


Do It

by pingnova (WarriorLoverInc)



Category: Welcome to Hell - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Demonic Possession, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Suicide, Temporary Character Death, past relationship, semi-graphic descriptions of death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:59:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WarriorLoverInc/pseuds/pingnova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Opinions were mixed. Humans, being a gossipy bunch by nature, made the business of others the business of all. Some believed he cared for nothing and no one, a few cited Valhalla Soundbox or some girl as his sole passion, but merely five knew the truth: Jonathan Combs simply cared too much. And it was his undoing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Start It

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for everything.

They met like a B-level Hollywood romcom, or maybe a really bad sitcom for kids. The kind full of cheap laughs and painful acting. Either way it belonged on screen, not real life, especially not his real life. Jonathan was the local western buffet’s busboy. At the time he had been sweeping a family of six's remains into his cart. (It should be noted that by ‘sweeping up remains’ he was in fact disposing of their leftover food and dirty dishes, though he would have happily collected dead bodies too. A face had been drawn on the table out of mashed potatoes and the state of the forks, all bent at ninety-degree angles for indiscernible reasons, was frustrating to say the least.) She was sitting across the room and sliced into his line of vision like a blunt knife through warm butter. His movements stuttered, and the dishes missed his cart and met the floor with loud, screeching snaps and shatters that immediately brought all attention to him. Their eyes locked for a single moment, before a litany of shitshitshit was his only thought and the manager's feet stomped into his frantic space as he clambered to clean everything up.

There was heat on his ears and neck, he knew she was watching. He almost wished she wasn't.

Almost.

_One mistake too many,_ his boss grunted as Jon turned in his apron and nametag, _goodbye, Jonathan Combs_. Leaving wasn't too terrible though, because she was at the door, apart from the pair he assumed were her parents, leaning against the wall and grinning from ear to ear.

"You go to my school, don't you?" There was only one high school in the area she could be referring to. At his puzzled confirmation the enticing smile turned mischievous. "Great! I'll find you at lunch, then."

And she did. Every day. Until it came to the point that he found himself alone with her at a booth in _Tian Jin's Authentic Tai_ with no recollection of when he agreed to let this girl encapsulate his every experience and thought.

'This girl', who was Magill Nancy, who was Lil, who was his friend, best friend, something more...

It was a Thursday, that's when it all began. Leaves were a thing of the past, sometimes at dawn people would catch a glimpse of snow before the sun mounted the sky to snatch it all away. Everyone rose early ― the bleary students, the determined parents, the euphoric children, the multitude, each bound to time so cosmically unanticipated that not even the sovereign of the wild blue yonder could match their patterns.

It was just another day, filled with droning voices, vicious gossip, the repulsive gym lockers, bits of eraser and pencil shavings.  Entirely average. The usual grind. Lil continued decorating the back of his head with spitballs in Biology and then they had lunch together.

"Your aim was off today," Jon managed around his mouthful of something the school called a hamburger, "I could feel some hit my arms."

Lil expertly twirled her fork and winked cheerily around a can of Coca-Cola. "I've got a nasty cold. You should find some extra spit on the back of your sweatshirt... that is, if you ever take it off." He made a face of utter disgust and earned himself a playful punch to the arm when he flung some pineapple chunks in her general direction. Three years wrought their relationship of dinners and movies, screaming through the rain and snowball fights, and some rather more mischievous shenanigans than any self-respecting parental unit would tolerate. Nobody could say for sure whether they were friends or an item, but everyone knew they were together. Early days and late nights were negligible, because no matter Jonathan’s mood Lil always seemed to fish a human out of the bags under his eyes and the gravel in his voice. It was that damn promising smirk. It left him powerless.

Fourth period Trigonometry got out, undamming the flood of squeaking hi-tops and deafening chatter. Someone spilled a water bottle, giggles and cries of surprise punched a hole in the atmosphere. Jonathan shouldered his way through the meandering flow with the sleek annoyance of one wronged too many times in these greasy halls of academic desperation. Just as Jon fit his favorite headphones snugly over his ears, his shoulder cracked against the wall as a group of jerseys hollered by, dashing ahead of him without even acknowledging the fact that he was there (and that they probably gave him a nasty bruise). To lessen the pain he absently rubbed the sensitive spot with jerky, ornery movements matching his expression, still keeping pace with the crowd.

There was a brief commotion down the hall, a few indignant cries, and a short, piercing scream. Jonathan kept walking, notching up the volume of his music. Girls screamed all the time in the hallways for one stupid reason or another. When he came to the knot of students, though, he noticed behind the blaring of Valhalla Soundbox that none of them were moving, or speaking, or smiling. In direct contrast to normal teenager-y behavior, they each stool rigid as Redwoods, some glancing nervously to their neighbors, others backing away or clutching hands and shoulders for support.

Now curious (and though he wouldn't admit it even under the pain of death: worried) he slid into the crowd, thumbing the button on his MP3 player to turn it off. Jonathan's hair stood on end in the hushed atmosphere, his surety flaking off with each step closer to the epicenter. Someone pushed past him, running from the circle with wide eyes. Unable to continue, Jon turned to the girl he was standing beside, a peach-skinned blonde from his second period History class. "What's happening?"

She turned towards him, opening her mouth to reply, but only released her air when she noticed who he was. The feeling of arduous, foreboding smog drew closer around his throat. Nervously she glanced from her retreating groupies to the frowning nobody, and when she saw no help coming she tentatively reached out and took his hand, slick with sweat and half drowned in his limp sleeves. She dragged him through the crowd, the onlookers at first resistant to their push, but moving to form a path once they realized she had Jonathan in tow.

Now only a person away from the focus of everyone’s horror, the girl released his hand, pushing him forward slightly before backing away, earlier courage forgotten. Jonathan tapped the shoulder of the boy in front of him, who silently moved to the side, revealing someone in a football jersey, crouching over a person curled up on the floor. Smeared on the floor next to him was a shallow puddle of deep red, and his stained fingers hovered timidly above a head of amaranthine hair.

Bile slowly rose to the lower back of his parched throat. Jonathan sucked in a choking breath and took the last two strides like a seasoned athlete, his pulse’s tattoo tumbling towards cardiac arrest. “Lil!”

The boy leaning over her startled backwards when Jon dropped to her opposite side. “What happened?!” Jon demanded in a pitch higher than healthy. His manic fingers danced around her prone upper body, brushing fabric and skin with feather-light hesitation and fear. Was she breathing?

“Uh, ‘hem, well. I wasn’t exactly looking where I was going and―”

Yes. Blood was crusting onto the side of her face, nose and mouth, but she was breathing. There was an odd rasp in her throat though, like paper on a windy day.

“―well she didn’t notice us coming and couldn’t move in time―”

Why wasn’t someone getting a teacher? Did they have nothing better to do but stand there and suck up the drama like mindless sponges? Jon considered picking her up, but his health teacher’s grim reminder in the first aid unit returned in a flash, ‘don’t move the injured if their condition may indicate a head or spinal injury’. Did the blood on her face mean anything?!

“―and we, kinda, um, ran into her―”

Jonathan’s head snapped up, arms protectively drawing around Lil’s chest, unheeding to the worry of irreparable injury as he gathered her gently into his lap. “ _You what_.”  Getting a better look at the boy, Jonathan recognized the jersey. It was one of the pack that had knocked him around earlier, ‘Something’ Melto. He wasn’t certain if the jock tried to defend himself, since everything was buried beneath the dull roar of indignant rage in his ears and a haze of crimson in his vision.

“STUDENTS!” came a guttural rumble from the back of the crowd, sending each kid into a guilty flurry of escaping movement. “CLASSES BEGAN TEN MINUTES AGO!” The Dean of Students, Mr. Ungar, slowly materialized as the mob dispersed with wary snickers. Garish industrial light beamed off his bald crown as he regarded the pair left kneeling on the ground, keen eyes absorbing the blood and lingering on Jonathan’s grinding teeth. “Come with me boys, and bring Ms. Nancy with you.”

 

 

“What happened?” Mr. Ungar spread his feet outside the closed door of the nurse’s office. Behind lay Lil, a little bleary but awake, and a nurse hovering anxiously over her, a damp cloth in one hand and a phone connected to an ambulance in the other. “Mr. Melto, you look remorseful.”

The boy cleared his throat nervously, shoulders hunched. “Yeah, we― I mean, I… uh, ran into her in the hallway…” He held his hands gingerly, glancing reluctantly at the dry blood crumbling from the folds of his skin. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I really didn’t mean to hurt her.”

The Dean’s lips pursed in pity. Jonathan frowned louder. “Go clean up a bit, son. Come back when you’re done.”

Jonathan whirled on the Dean once the jersey was out of earshot. “Are you just going to let him off the hook?”

Mr. Ungar raised an eyebrow. “Off the hook for what?”

“Well obviously he hurt Lil.” Jonathan scoffed.

“And you think it was purposeful.”

“Of course it was!” He fiddled with the frayed cuff of his sweatshirt, stomach dropping at the faint flecks of blood he inadvertently collected from Lil. When he looked up again, the Dean was speaking in hushed whispers with the nurse, who was half in, half out the office door.

“Lil will be going to the hospital.” Mr. Ungar informed Jonathan grimly, brow furrowed. “You may return to class.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened. “But―”

“No ‘buts’, Mr. Combs.” He placed a knowing hand upon Jon’s defensive shoulder. “I am aware of Ms. Nancy’s importance to you. Rest assured her condition will not deteriorate within the few hours left of school. You may visit her later, if family permits.”

So Jonathan grudgingly completed the day, hand hovering expectantly over the silent cell phone in his hoodie pocket. No calls or texts came in. The last bell rang and he dashed outside, bowling over indignant students heading towards the bus loop. Walking to the hospital from the school was faster than from his own home. He could get there by four if he hurried.

In an odd twist of earlier events, he crashed into ‘Something’ Melto.

The jock, being an accomplished quarterback, didn’t move and inch, of course. Jonathan, on the other hand, found himself with smarting pride and posterior.

“Hey,” without asking permission Melto hauled Jon to his feet by the upper arm, oblivious to his volcanic expression, “do you need a ride?”

“Need a ride to what?” Jonathan bit out, brushing dust off his clothes.

Melto sheepishly ruffled the back of his hair. “To see Lil. In the hospital.”

“No, I don’t need a ride.” Jon crisply adjusted the strap of his shoulder bag. “Now if you’ll excuse me―”

“Jonathan―” Jon violently shrugged off the apologetic hand that gripped his shoulder, glaring at the other boy’s put-out (and maybe a little annoyed) expression. If he wanted something he wasn’t getting it. “Hey, everybody knows how much you love Lil, I’m sorry I hurt her. I’m not trying for pity, I just want to help you get back to her again.”

With a reluctant scoff Jon shoved his hands in his pockets, reconsidering the jock’s offer. It really would be faster, and no amount of pride could save Jonathan from his underwhelming desire for exercise. A car ride would be fast and idle, two of his favorite things.

“You could choose the tunes…?” Melto tried weakly.

Jonathan sighed, finally caving. “Fine,” he spat, “but this doesn’t excuse you for anything.”

“Of course not.” If Jonathan saw Melto roll his eyes and smile tightly, he didn’t say anything about it. “I wasn’t expecting it to.”

 

 

The car ride was tense and silent. Music wasn’t exactly at the forefront of Jonathan’s mind. By the time they reached Glen’s Memorial Hospital there wasn’t anything in his head. Just blank, vague worry. Jonathan couldn’t find the processing power to continue to be annoyed with Melto as the jock trailed him from the front doors, to the front desk, to the waiting room.

_He’s like a duckling_ , Jonathan stewed in ambiguous thought, trying to think of anything but Lil’s worrying condition. There was a rough shifting sound to his left, and he glanced up to Melto’s outstretched hand, then his hopeful face. “I’m not sure we were ever introduced right. I’m Zack. Zack Melto.”

Too distracted to give his bafflement much thought, Jonathan lightly shook the proffered appendage. It nearly dwarfed his own hand in comparison, and was rough and calloused, probably from long hours honing his football talent. “Jonathan. Combs. But everyone just calls me Jon.”

“I know.” Melto― _Zack_ ―grinned brightly, suddenly chipper.

Before Jonathan could grace the odd giddiness with a reaction the nurse called from the desk. Rising quickly, he accepted the visitors badges―one for him and one that he passed to Zack―and trotted after a nurse as he wove his way through the sea of desks and scrubs, pushing open the double doors of the nighttime wards in a practiced burst of strength. He introduced himself as Alex Gupte once they checked in with the desk clerk.

“Your friend is here for overnight observation and is scheduled a CAT scan tomorrow.” Alex adjusted his pencil thin glasses and flipped to the second page of Lil’s file. “They’re checking a mass in her lungs.”

Jonathan’s heart stuttered. “Her lungs?” He had assumed something had been injured when Zack had knocked into Lil, but he hadn’t expected anything as deep and fragile as lungs.

Alex nodded, stopping before a curtained off corner of the overnight bay. “It showed up on her X-rays, but a CAT scan is required to determine exactly what it might be.” He snapped the papers on the clipboard back into place and replaced a pen behind his ear. “You’ll have to speak to her doctor about any prognosis. Visiting hours are nine until seven.” He stepped away from the pair of boys, gesturing crisply towards the curtains. “Her father is visiting as well. You know where the desk is.” Then he left.

Zack nervously peered at Jonathan. “You don’t think I did this?”

Jon merely grunted in reply. As unwilling as he was to forgive Zack for any perceived slight to Lil, he could hardly believe that one chance crash in the school hallways could do her the amount of damage the nurse had alluded to.

He thrust open the curtains.

To the right of the bed sat Lil’s father, Mr. Nancy, gray eyes expectant and steadfast as he nodded in acknowledgement to Jon and turned with a tired grin to Zack. “I’m already very well acquainted to Mr. Combs here, but I’m afraid I’ve never met you, young man.”

Jonathan tuned out whatever introductions and small talk they engaged in as he approached the bed. Lil lay propped up by a mountain of stark white pillows, clothed in a baby blue hospital gown. A clear tube went up one nostril, which made her look ridiculous, because even in sleep the plain irritation on her face wouldn’t be smoothed away. They had cleaned the blood off her face, but without her normal baggy clothes (no doubt being washed) she seemed diminished, smaller.

There was a sudden flash in Jonathan’s eyes as the ground fell out from under him and he was in another, more familiar hospital room, painted in the sepia tones of the past. Here was the “vintage” glass Coca-Cola bottle on the windowsill, filled with murky water, a few fluffing dandelions, and the only wilting daisy he could find on the bleak lot surrounding the building. Plenty of bouquets filled the flat surfaces, no doubt more expensive and definitely more pleasing to the eye, but this was the only one in her direct line of sight. As time progressed she moved less and less, describing to him one empty night that it felt like she had inhaled superglue, how each breath was through the thick skin of the elephant sitting on her chest. Her soft, reassuring voice (in his childhood only raised in the boisterous laughter she always apologized for needlessly) grew filmy and baked thin without breath.

There was a tube up her nose too.

“Jonathan?”

He blinked once, still trapped, but recognized the voice and reeled back into the present. It was Lil.

“Lil.” he sighed in relief, joining her in a small smile. She was still laying in the bed, it looked like she had just woken up, vibrant hair spread in a messy halo on the pillow. She wrinkled her nose in disgust, triggering a reluctant cough that she moved to cover with her jacket sleeve before realizing that the reflex was useless. “How are you?”

She shrugged flippantly. “This is one hell of a cold, let me tell you.”

“Language, young lady.” her father chided without any real fire.

A grin. “The old man’s been worrying himself thinner than Brittany Stevens. Too much more and he’ll disappear completely.”

Her father released an exasperated (faintly relieved) breath, and Jonathan coughed out a surprised chuckle. At least the dreary hospital atmosphere wasn’t getting to her perpetually facetious mood. Backed into a corner of the curtain, Zack laughed awkwardly.

Taking notice of the fourth party, Lil raised a brow. “Who’s the jersey?”

Mr. Nancy stood with a deep grunt, walking up said jersey’s left side and alighting a firm hand on his shoulder. “This is Mr. Melto, hun. He’s your classmate?”

Zack nodded guiltily. “Please, call me Zack. I was the one that pushed you down in the hallway, Lil. I’m sorry.”

In true teenager fashion she tossed out her arm listlessly with a casual grunt. “It’s fine, man.”

“No it’s not.” Zack gripped his hands in frustration, none of it directed outward at all. Only in. “If I hadn’t been so careless in the hallway you wouldn’t be here right now and I―”

“Hey, woah, calm down, Mr. Masochist.” Lil’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “If what the doctors are saying is true then this thing with my lungs has been going on for awhile now, and if anything you giving me a good wallop to the chest made me realize it was more serious than a cold. So god bless you, Zack. Really.”

He blinked blankly. “... really?”

Lil nearly cackled at his lost expression. What she got was more of a cough. “Really.”

The corner of Jonathan’s mouth was unable to resist her pull, and quirked upward. Unfortunately, he remembered the grim, nearly one-sided conversation with Nurse Alex earlier, and it flatlined again.

“Lil, Mr. Nancy,” he gathered their attention, “so what are the doctors saying? Something about a ‘mass’ in your lungs?”

Father and daughter glanced at each other, silently conspiring the way close family will. Mr. Nancy gripped the reins. “It was in her X-rays―”

“―lots of white.” Lil added unhelpfully.

“Yes,” her father cast her toothy grin a skeptical look, “there was lots of white. In her lungs. Where it shouldn’t be.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Zack commented, equally unhelpful.

“It’s not.” Mr. Nancy deadpanned. “But check back in a day or two. Tomorrow she gets a CAT scan so they can have a better grasp on the situation. The doctor said that there are a few things it could be, plenty of them curable.”

Lil shrugged, eyes cast to the hospital-issue blanket. “We’ll see, I guess.”

“Hey, honey.” Lil reluctantly met her father’s eyes as he dragged his chair closer to her side. He gripped her hand again in reassurance. “You’ll be fine.”

There was reflective silence for a few taut moments, before Lil’s: “Does this mean we can order out tonight? I vote the Double Whammy Garbage Pizza.”

 

 

When Jonathan returned home that night the impeccably clean house was full of the sound of Queen’s _Bohemian Rhapsody_ and a screaming kettle. Bemusedly he slipped into the kitchen to take it off the heat, but it wasn’t there.

“Em!” he called into the noise. “ _Aunt Em!!_ ”

Queen petered off. “What?!” came down the hallway, “I’m kinda busy!”

“Kettle!” he yelled again, tossing his messenger bag onto the kitchen table and fishing a can of Cola out of the refrigerator. He smirked as a few almost-swears echoed through the room, and eventually the pot’s screeching ceased. There was some rapid stomping from the stairs, and then Aunt Em appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her short dark chestnut hair was half brushed, and her pastel bronze cheeks were puffed in indignation.

“Where were you earlier?” She fumbled the stainless steel kettle in her hand onto the kitchen stove. “You put the tea in a cabinet too high again, I had to boil the water in my room and keep an eye on it until you showed up again.” She froze at the counter and abruptly twirled to face him. “You didn’t get in a fight did you?”

“ _What?_ ” Huffily he rose to retrieve the tea. When standing right next to Aunt Em, he was almost a head taller. “I’ve never been in a fight.” Not any he wanted to be in, anyway.

She squinted up at his face as she accepted the box of teabags as though she could bring the truth into focus with just her naked, olive eyes.

Jonathan caved with a world-weary sigh. “Lil’s in the hospital.”

A hand fluttered to her lips. “Oh!” She carefully set the box on the countertop and wrapped an apprehensive arm around his middle. “I’m sorry, Jonny. Will she be okay?”

“Yes.” He answered automatically. “Of course she’ll be.” The statement was as much for Aunt Em as for himself.

She furrowed her brow, withdrawing her arm and grabbing a few teabags out of the box. “Well if you, or they, ever need any help, I’m right here in all my calculating glory.”

Jonathan mumbled a noncommittal “ _mm_ …”, watching as she set the bags to steep while dragging at her hair again. “Going somewhere special tonight?”

Aunt Em positively radiated cheer, like a nuclear core in fact. Jonathan leaned away.

“I’ve got a date!” she hummed. “From my yoga class.”

“That’s nice.” he replied flatly, a little put-off by such sunny behavior. “Don’t do the buffet. I’ve warned you enough about what the secret ingredient in their ‘award winning’ soup is.”

She chuckled, thrusting a mug of tea into his unwilling hands. “Don’t worry, Jonny, it’s _Tian Jin’s_. You like that place.”

Lil’s warm disposition and exploding packets of hot sauce, sharing rice and speculating as to whether the ‘chicken’ was really chicken at all. “Yeah…” He really did love _Tian Jin’s_ , even if it wasn’t exactly for the food. “And stop calling me ‘Jonny’. I told you it’s ‘Jon’ now.”

Aunt Em smiled indulgently around her mug of tea. “Of course, Jon.”

 

 

It was six when she left for her date, and by seven Jon hadn’t moved from his impression in the couch cushions. The remote was in his hand, a shitty sitcom re-run on the TV, but nothing was in his head. Just static as he tried his best to not think about anything. As if finding Lil curled on the floor in a pool of her own blood wasn’t traumatic enough for one day, he’d been thrust into the dark corner of memory he had planned to avoid for the rest of his natural life. Remembering her final days.

“What am I doing?” He sat up and shook his head violently, snapping off the TV and pulling on his sneakers. Maybe a walk would help clear his head.

He was already two blocks away from home when he realized he’d forgotten his cell phone. “ _Rrgh!_ ” He dragged a hand down his face. “Can’t anything work out today?!” An innocent chunk of sidewalk fell victim to his mood and skipped down the empty, silent street when he kicked it.

The street wavered as he drew inexorably into recollection, pausing in the faint, flickering light of an under maintenanced streetlight. Tired images behind his unsettled eyes, hands curled into his hoodie pockets. It was years ago now, the grainy memories cantabile like sand. Acrid disinfectant stewing beneath his tongue and eyeballs, teasing for a sneeze with every inhale. There was a frayed deck of cards, missing the Joker and one Queen, worn thinner than primeval cloth. It had seen too many games of solitaire and Uno, and now lay forgotten in the shadow of one of the gigantic monitors. Sound was always a void, ears vexed to till numb by the equipment's steady low hum.

It was just Jonathan beside her bed, tiny in the hospital-issue chair, swimming in an oversized (but warm) sweatshirt. They had tried contacting his father, but if he had heard their desperation he hadn’t bothered to re-establish contact. There was a distinct sense of certain termination, like a tomb waited patiently for its occupant.

She told him not to worry, Auntie would take care of him. But he didn’t want Auntie, he wanted Momma. Still, here was Momma, and soon she would be gone, no matter what Jonathan did to keep her with him.

The day she left forever was the day he decided that no one would ever leave again.

 

 

The next day came. It was still a weekday, which meant school, but Jonathan was oblivious to to most everything he was supposed to be learning. The entire eight hours of classes were agonizingly slow, but too fast all the same. Every second the red hand ticked was another second closer to Lil and her fate.

The final bell rang, and he trudged through the crowd, fully planning on walking if he had to, but not entirely surprised to see Zack waiting for him next to the flagpoles in the parking lot.  They didn’t say anything to each other, and the jock merely gave him a strained smile when he dropped Jon off at the front doors of the hospital. Somehow the silence was worse this time, absent of anger and instead filled with the terrible unknown.

He checked in with the front desk, and followed Alex through the halls again. When he reached Lil’s curtains he took a moment to collect himself, then entered with a small smile, happy (at the very least) to see her.

Lil sat uncomfortably in front of the mound of pillows, worrying a strand of hair with her teeth. “I feel like I’m rubbing my butt through a nest of rocks.”

Her father groaned in sympathy. “And have you tried these hospital chairs? I should sue for damages.” He dragged a second one through the curtain from the empty ‘room’ next to Lil’s, and offered it to Jon. “Dunno how long this will take, son.”

“Thanks.” Jon took a seat, and instantly regretted it. Mr. Nancy was right, these chairs were not made for human beings.

There was a commotion outside the curtain, a shuffling of papers and squeaking sneakers. A grumble of frustration and the clicking of a ballpoint pen. The curtain pulled back to reveal Lil’s doctor, unsmiling and handling a folder of CAT scans. Jonathan looked desperately to Mr. Nancy, face grimmer than death, and Lil, too pale. He turned back to the doctor just as she took an expansive breath and brushed a bang out of her face.

“I’m afraid the results of your tests are not good.” she enunciated. “Lil, we’ve caught your form of fibrosis late.” The doctor frowned. “There are treatments to make you comfortable and survive longer, transplant is a possibility, but I’m afraid…” Jonathan’s stomach dropped to his feet. She looked apologetically towards the father, whose hands trembled toward his daughter’s rigid shoulder. “I’m afraid it’s terminal.”

 

 

So today would  mark a new start for them both. Blood slid between his fingers, dragging stagnant ice across his pores, seeping under his ragged nails. It was the end for his sweatshirt, so he used its ruin to his advantage, manipulating the saturated sleeves to wipe away mistakes or the sweat on his brow. Rust dusted his forehead, cheeks, and nose, dry and flaking into his eyes with every furrow of concentration.

Sleek tendrils of runes and unpracticed Latin characters wove a circle around the spot Jon was kneeling, the rotting branch he had dragged through the dry dirt to create them discarded at his side. He wasn't exactly an artist, but he could render details better than most people his age, so while copying this design had been difficult, he at least could rest soundly with the knowledge that it was perfect. In his right hand was one of his aunt's glass Pyrex measuring cups, half-full of separating blood and a few dead flies if he looked close enough. Occasionally he would swirl it to keep it mixed, and pour it in a careful stream into the shallow trenches he had carved into the ground.

The Devil's Tramping Ground was his chosen location. It was rumored that Satan himself rose from Hell in the night regularly to pace in circles in this very spot, plotting and scheming the downfall of mankind. While Jonathan was skeptical of the claim that the devil really did show up here, right outside of his town of all places in the world, he was also desperate for all the satanic connection he could reasonably get.  It also had the advantage of being in a rather secluded stand of trees, far from the nearest back road or suburban home, so the chances of being walked in on were statistically lower.

With a quiet slurp the last of the blood oozed into the trails, the end of something vaguely resembling a swirly Z.  Something electric crawled up his skin, raising tingling goosebumps and singeing the ends of his slack hair. All sound muffled, and the air became thick with a rotting, sulfurous stink. He coughed in vain, fanning around his face to try to dissipate the terrible heavy taste. Jon's bloody sleeve roughed against his dirty face, peeling blood cracking into his nose and mouth, but still better then the weird smell.

Carefully he maneuvered his way out of the circle with the stick and the Pyrex dish, tossing the stick into the woods and the measuring cup into the bag slung over his bicycle. The metallic scent of taboo was heavy on his tongue as he pulled out the heavy leatherbound. Or it could have been the smell of rat crap, if the decrepit state of the book was anything to go by. _Evocation Made Easy_ , proclaimed the cover, _Adapted Chapters of  the Lesser Key of Solomon, New Revised Version, Edition N° 3_. There was no author. In the upper right hand corner was an obnoxiously modern 20% Off sticker, because according to the antiques snob he had bought it from the contents were absolute rubbish. Still, she couldn't explain what had happened to its previous owner, who had mysteriously disappeared one night, leaving nothing but a simple circle drawn on his bedroom wall in paint made of ashes.

" _Probably ran off to commune with witches or something._ " the shopkeep had scoffed, adjusting her chunky red Ray-Ban frames. " _Look kid, I won't ask why you want this nasty old thing, but you've still got to pay for it, so chop chop, I don't get paid enough as it is_."

So he had closed the book, thumb in page 90, and forked over $31.03 to the pissy lady.

Presently, he reviewed the process. He’d drawn the circle in blood, and from the creepy feeling and nasty smell it was emitting he was pretty sure it had been done right. That fulfilled Sight and Smell. For Touch he merely had to have a hand on any part of the circle. Mind required that he have an image in his head of what he wanted from the circle. Sound was a stupid Latin chant, translated into English for his ease. Taste however…

“Ew.” Jonathan zipped his mouth closed. “I have to _taste_ the blood?!” This was his first time having second thoughts. He wasn’t sure how telling that was about his general disposition. With a grimace he realized he’d already done that too, his face was covered in a thin film of crusting blood and dirt, some of it crunching beneath his teeth with every grind of his jaw. “Nasty.”

Inching closer to the circle, where the air above distorted like heatwaves on a highway, he placed the very tip of his foot in one of the shallow trenches, mourning his favorite pair of shoes as red coated the white toe.

He cleared his throat. “I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O Spirit, that thou dost forthwithappear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH,” he shouted the all-caps, butchering the pronunciation no doubt, “do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals, do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded.”

Jonathan stared incredulously at the page, still leaning awkwardly away from the circle while being inside it in only the most technical sense. “This is real bullshit.”

Finally deciding to abandon the entire operation, he was struck with sudden sense of confusion when the foot barely submerged in the bloody trench unbalanced him, refusing to budge and even seeming to sink deeper than he had dug the ruts in the ground, the blood slowly slurping toward his ankle.

Panic wiped his mind. “Ah no no nono _no…!_ ” With a mighty heave he wrenched his foot out with a sickening sucking noise. He fell to his butt with a wince, catching himself before his upper back could hit the dirt. The book rattled off to his left, open and face down to the bare earth.

The electric, staticky feeling intensified, buzzing between the folds of Jonathan’s clothes and where his body met the ground. Wind whipped through the empty trees around him, filling the air with the rattling of bony branches, fighting his hair into a hodgepodge nest, pulling at his clothes in vain. Natural, ambient moonlight waned as the trenches began to glow faintly, bursting into flame in a sudden gust of air. The roaring fire twisted violently with the angry air, forcing Jonathan quickly away from its scorching edge.

Nervously he glanced towards the little-used trail he had biked up to get to the clearing. No one appeared, but the noise and spectacle worried him. This would be really hard to explain away.

With a coil of flame drawing the entire fire into the middle like a corkscrewing band of silk, the hellish phenomenon vanished. There was no smoke, and as he cautiously inched towards the round of dirt, he realized the circle had disappeared too. Instead there was something small lying on the ground, blinking owlishly in disorientation.

“Uh,” he glanced from side to side before meeting gaze with the smiling kid at his feet, “who are you?”

The grin filled out with fangs as it jumped to its feet, then the air. Jonathan took a leery step away. “I’m a demon,” it’s voice a piping treble, “and I’m here to haunt you!”


	2. Send It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They've already started something, time to Send It.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Hell is supposed to be funny, I growl to myself. (Apologies in advance for any mistakes with POV/spelling/grammar I'm blind to my own work at this point.)

With a great lungful of useless breath the airborne demon arched its entire body reminiscent of a languid cat. “Ah, it’s nice to be topside again.” It paused to better examine Jonathan, who was brushing chunky dirt off the pages of _Evocation Made Easy_. “You’re a mess.”

Jon focused on the front of his hoodie, splattered with blood and dirt. The skin of his forehead crackled almost painfully with the gross mixture dried to it. “Yeah.” He glanced down at his equally stained hands. "It's chicken blood." It had taken a lot of convincing to get Loredo, a rightly suspicious co-worker from his days at the buffet, to collect and give him all that blood. If anyone noticed that there was a sudden influx of chicken in the dishes, well… they hadn’t deemed to complain.

It cocked its head, squinting incredulously. "No wonder _I_ got sent up here. Chicken blood's a cheap fare. I suppose you don't tip well either."

The dismissive tone in its voice ruffled Jon's feathers with dull acrimony. “Whatever. It worked, you’re here. Will you do what I want?”

The demon shrugged hugely, waving the sheaf of papers. “If it’s in the contract you wrote up, then yes.”

Jonathan blinked blankly. “Contract?” When had he written a contract?

“Yeah, see.” It spread the papers like a hand of cards. Messy, unfamiliar characters were scrawled across each page in red ink―no, blood. The blood he had used to make the circle. Upon closer inspection Jonathan recognized a few, also from the circle. And there, at the bottom of the last page, his unpracticed signature, still dripping.

“The circle was a contract…” he mumbled to himself in surprise.

“Personally I think paper contracts are super outdated but―” It shrugged, snapping the fingers of its right hand. Like a cigarette lighter, the end of the demon’s pointer ignited with a small intense flame. It gave the papers a light flick, and they burned into nothing, not even ashes. “―they’re better at delivery now.”

“Ah…” Jonathan chose to assume that burning the contract was what it meant by delivery and hoped it wouldn’t ask him to make a new one. He’d had enough blood to last him a lifetime. “Great.”

Far to the east a distant car honked angrily. The noise roughed against the vulnerable shell of his ears with the chill night time breeze. Jonathan took a moment more to inspect the little demon he had summoned while shrugging further into his hoodie. Like a beacon distracting and bright, the grin slashed across its face had yet to leave, which seemed a little off-color for the spawn of Hell, but somehow naturally matched its oddly sharp canines. A faint green aura fogged the edges of its image.

And then he noticed― “Hey, is that… _a skirt?_ ”

It grinned sunnily. “Yeah!” With outstretched arms it spun in the air to demonstrate the purple skirt’s flowing folds. “You like it?”

Jonathan raised a brow so high it nearly flew away. “Uhh…”

The demon paused with a considering look. “Even if you don’t ― I do!” It floated closer to Jonathan, upside down, its warm brown hair the only thing that felt compelled by gravity. Even then the ends curled into a ridiculous cowlick. “I’ve met some real downers over the years.”

Jonathan shrugged thinly, defending himself from the demon’s unnerving friendliness by turning away. “Whatever. I need to get home now.” He glanced at the sky, clear of clouds, the moon high and beaming cold light. Nervously he realized it must be somewhere around midnight. It was a vain but active hope that Aunt Em hadn’t noticed his absence.

He biked home at a stiff pace, the air completely silent between him and the demon, whose curious gaze burned twin holes into the back of his head. He should have known that he wouldn’t escape his aunt. She caught him from the shadows of the kitchen door, eyes wide and horrified, soaking up the blood and mud staining his clothes and skin. Their worry chased his heels to the shower, where he stewed guiltily in the steam, water sloughing the mess off his skin for nearly an hour.

When he finished washing up he clothed with a shiver and sat on the edge of the chipped sink to aggressively brush the nastiness out of his teeth. Aunt Em knocked lightly, and he eventually let her in, expression purposefully dead.

“You know you can tell me anything, right, Jonny?” She gently placed a hand on his scraped knee.

Jonathan met her worried, earnest eyes, then looked beyond her, to the washer. The demon sat on top, vibrating mildly with it and smiling benignly. It even gave a friendly little wave. “Yeah, I know.”

 

Sunday dawned without him, since he stayed curled up in bed with a massive migraine. Aunt Em checked on him in the morning, still waiting for an explanation that would never come, and left him with some painkillers and a water bottle. Whenever he cracked open an eye it was 50/50 whether or not the demon would be nearby. So far it hadn’t done much aside from poke its head in things like it had never seen a house before. Generally it would just phase intangibly through anything solid, but occasionally made a few nods to physics by maneuvering around things.

By midday the pain begun to fade enough that he could get up to pee. When he exited the bathroom after business there was the demon, hovering above the hallway carpet. “Morning, Jonathan.”

Jonathan just grunted, trudging back to his room for jeans and a new shirt. He didn’t bother to see how it handled his breezy attitude, but when later he opened the fridge for the tub of butter there was the demon again, sitting amongst the food. “Hey hot stuff, see something ya like?” Its eyebrows. They wiggled.

The door closed in its face.

_What…?_

He turned to leave, maybe lay down and sleep until this weird hallucination from the migraine wore off, but it was behind him too, nearly leaning on his shoulder. Grinning. “Weren’t you going to get something from there?”

Jonathan shuffled away, frowning heavier than a thundercloud. Not a hallucination then. Not any more than an actual demon could be anyway. “I don’t want it anymore.” Two slices of toast popped out of the tea/coffee/toaster multi-appliance his aunt was so fond of but hardly used. He snatched them up and ate them dry.

“Me sitting in the food won’t make it any worse.” The demon informed him amicably. It paused and tilted its head in thought. “Wait, I dunno. I’ve heard rumors.”

Jonathan rubbed his face lethargically, toast hanging out of his mouth like a huge tongue. This was unbelievable. “What do you want?”

“A lot of things.” It hummed. “But why do you ask?”

Jonathan munched on the toast thoughtfully. “You’re really… friendly. It’s weird…”

“Why shouldn’t I be friendly?” The demon lay on its stomach in the air and crossed its legs like somebody learning a secret at a sleepover. “Because I’m a demon?”

“Well,” Jonathan raised an eyebrow, “yeah. They don’t exactly have spotless track records.” That much was obvious. Demons were evil and ran around stealing bodies and setting stuff on fire. Lead crosses burned them and they made people disappear from old empty mansions on foggy nights. Friendly was the last word he’d tack onto a description of them. Then again, demons were supposed to be terrifying monstrosities. This one just looked like a kid.

He leaned against the counter, stuffing the rest of the toast in his mouth and scrawling a Post-It note to his aunt telling her that he had the grocery list and would be out with his cellphone. The fridge quivered when he slapped it to the crooked door, and he glanced back at the demon when it trailed him to the front hall. “Are you going to follow me everywhere?”

It shrugged. “Of course. I’m on from nine to five, it’s nearly twelve.”

Jon raised a brow, begging explanation.

“Work hours.”

Demon work hours? Aloud he replied with only a grunt.

The grocery store was pulsing with the Sunday rush, customers clamoring to restock pantries before the work week bound their hands. Which meant the frozen food section was nearly impassable. A grandmother nearly took his head off when she swept the last frozen lasagna from beneath his hands in the freezer aisle and her ten ton Vera Bradley skimmed the side of his skull.

“That was close,” the demon smirked, not sounding at all upset.

Jon instinctively started to reply, his standard ‘shut up’, before realizing no one was freaking out about a floating, glowing person. Which likely meant no one else could see it. Which entirely meant he’d be speaking angrily to thin air. He settled for another grunt, uncrumpling the list from his pocket as a distraction.

In the paper products aisle it startled him by popping out of the shelf once he’d grabbed a package of plates. When searching for his aunt’s preferred legal pads it sat on the floor next to his feet, pointing out all the pink ones with kittens on them in a way that seemed facetious until he turned and noticed its pensive gaze. Once he found his usual deodorant it commented on the name, ‘Silky Sunrise’, and asked if it could feel his armpit hairs to test the name’s apparent claim. It was when it made a curious popping sound in his ear while he looked for good tangerines that he snapped and threw one. It dodged, smiling, and floated next to him as they watched it bounce away. Jon cupped his face.

“Why are you throwing things at a ghost?” It cheerily twirled as it noticed a staff member’s rapid approach. “Oh look, you made a friend.”

“Can I help you, sir?” The staff member, a twenty-something guy with a greasy bowl cut, eyed the basket in Jon’s hand, tone falsely bright.

Jon held up his hands, basket handles sliding to the crook of his elbow. “Nope. Thanks. I just had a mishap with the tangerines.” He glared off to the side, or more specifically, at the demon, who seemed very pleased to have any attention on it at all.

His terse answer got him a suspicious look. “Well if the produce ever gives you trouble again please feel free to ask an employee for assistance.”

“Yeah,” Jon muttered. He picked up a random crate of tangerines and crammed it into his basket. The staff guy didn’t move, so Jon stuck his nose in the list and walked quickly to the next aisle. While staring at a shelf of Lay’s products he caught the demon in his peripheral vision.

“ _Hey_ ,” he hissed lowly at it. “ _Your nose looks like a jelly bean_.”

“What?!” it squeaked, covering the feature with one hand and tugging at the air next to its ear like it expected something to be there. “That was uncalled for!”

“Well, don’t try to make me look crazy in public.” Jonathan said, shoving a loud bag of potato chips in his basket to drown out his voice. “I don’t need people thinking I’m going insane.”

“And you need chips?” The demon giggled around the hand. _Giggled_. Jonathan bristled.

“ _Go away_ ,” he growled, cheeks flushed, eyes frantically scanning for bystanders who might see.

“Hey, I haven’t been anything but nice to you since we first met,” the demon croaked, sounding vaguely injured.

“You forgot _annoying_. But yes, and that’s weird. Weird.” Jonathan stressed. “Why are you so weird?” Before he gave either of them room for thought he stomped out of the aisle. Forget about grocery shopping. Most of the list was in his basket, the rest could wait until he wasn’t being harassed.

Checking out was a blur of movement he didn’t bother to register. The handlebars of his bicycle were bitingly cold, and he pedaled home fast enough that they never had time to warm up. His skin stung and tingled in the warmth of his house, and as he dropped the grocery bags on the kitchen counter his aunt walked in precariously balancing a calculator and mug in one hand.

“Hey Jonny, this came in the―” she began.

“The migraine is coming back, Aunt Em, I’m going back to sleep. Afternoon.” Without further preamble he jogged up the stairs, its creaking drowning out her confused “Sleep well”.

The demon watched from his bedroom doorway as Jonathan slipped on his headphones. He gave it a warning glare and turned up the music much louder than necessary, flopping on his back. Noise drowned out his thoughts, and by some miracle he drifted off to sleep. When he awoke it was dark outside, and the demon was nowhere to be found. No music blared from his headphones and the MP3 player in his pocket was stone cold. It had shut itself off.

Jonathan’s face was half smushed into the pillow, illuminated only by the MP3’s boot up screen, when the demon floated through his door. He sighed heavily and shoved his whole face into the pillow. Maybe he could just suffocate.

“Your aunt’s boring.” It grinned like it was happy he was awake again. “She just stares at numbers all the time.”

“Mmm.” Jonathan said, the disinterested sound buzzing through his pillow in direct juxtaposition to its cheery aura. Somewhere in Evocation Made Easy it should say something about the demon being annoying.

In the dark he couldn’t see (not that he wanted to see) but he heard the demon scratch its head and the rustle of its clothes as it settled on the floor next to his bed. There was a blissful stretch of silence, but as the MP3’s home screen appeared a soft question floated from the floor.

“Jonathan?” When it got no reply it tried again. “Hey, Jonathan?”

“What?” he mumbled, clicking through the artist list.

“What did one casket… say to the sick casket?”

Jon stared incredulously at the faint cowlick poking above the edge of his bed. “Are you trying to tell me a joke?”

“I’m not trying, _I am_ ,” it insisted. “But now we have to start all over again. You ruined it.” A breath. “What did one casket say to the sick casket?”

Silence.

“C’mon Jonathan,” it pleaded.

“Will you shut up if I do this thing?” Jon adjusted his headphones to better block out reality once he found the right music.

The cowlick tilted. “... Yes.”

“Fine, then. What did it say?”

“Is that you coffin’?” It was said so zealously and followed so closely by a snicker that Jon found himself puffing an amused breath. Much to his horror the demon noticed it too.

“Hah!” Its eyes peeped over the edge of the bed.

“I sneezed.” At least in the dark it couldn’t see the dust of embarrassment on his cheeks.

It’s eyes crinkled knowingly. “What a great time to sneeze.”

“Hey, okay,” he scrambled to reclaim his honor. “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?”

“What?” The demon bounced, eyes alight.

“The Holocaust,” he deadpanned.

Its nose wrinkled as it thought about how it should react. “That wasn’t even a joke.”

“You said you would shut up,” Jon grumbled, staring at the MP3 screen without really seeing it. This was not a conversation he had anticipated. His eyelids fell to half mast and at the back of his head a leftover ache from the migraine made itself known, pounding blunt nails into the base of his skull. The clock’s glowing numbers said it was past midnight. His bed vibrated when a chair scraped across the floor in the kitchen below. Aunt Em was still up, probably working late on a new project. Sometimes he waved to her as he walked through at night to go to bed and found her asleep on her papers at the kitchen table in the morning as he prepared to run to the bus stop.

He sighed, rolling his throbbing head slowly. The V’s of the artist list finally appeared, he selected his band, and then lowered the volume. The first song he skipped; he’d changed the title to include Lil’s name, since the ongoing joke was that it was about her, and he wasn’t going to think about that right now.

Out of the corner of his eye he sensed movement, and he turned to see the demon running fingers through its mind-boggling hair. It smirked, eyes glinting, then combed it all into soft puffer-fish spikes.

“Punk’s not dead,” it whispered.

Jonathan chuckled quietly. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Sock!” The demon bobbed its head, grinning.

“Sock?” Jon guffawed.

An eager nod. “Sock.” He snatched at Jon’s headphone cord, disrupting the music with screeching demonic static.

“ _Sock!_ ”

 

Down in the kitchen, Aunt Em quietly sipped her tea around a smile, surrounded by half-completed equations and impatient documents. It was good to hear him laugh. While she was pretty sure this was indicative of impending mental breakdown, she would be happy for him now and help him with the aftermath when it came.

She wiggled her fingers spastically. Bless caffeinated tea. Now, onto amortization of intangible assets. For a minute she spared a pensive glance at the envelope propped against her filing bin. It could wait for later.

 

 

Truthfully, the worst part was waiting.

There were hair-raising scans and tests, rattling pills and more tubes up her nose. Always, there was the waiting. Time that went too slow and too fast all the same, something uncontrollable. It was terrifying that she no longer held sway. Even worse was the realization that she never really had.

And so, helpless, she waited.

There was confirmation and denial. Calls from family and friends. A flood of messages via phone and mail. People she had never even met were gracing her with sympathies. Balding men and jumpy women in loose business suits talked organs and last wishes. Did she want to go to Disney World? Of course she didn’t want to go to Disney World. She just wanted to get better. She wanted to go to school and worry about homework and drop snowballs down the back of Jonathan’s stupid hoodie.

I’d love to go to Disney, she said instead.

The lady with organ donation spoke a two-way street. Lil was on the waiting list, but with hundreds of thousands of people on the same list, and only thousands of donors, her chances were low. Survival for up to four years with a full lung transplant was 65%. Roughly translated: there was no escape. She left them with a pamphlet on donation after death, respectful and quiet, yet hopeful. Lil wasn’t sure what exactly for.

She was assigned to a breathing class, which was full of mostly old, wrinkly people. They crowded around her, overly friendly, but comforting in an odd way. Unlike most people who had spoken to her, it wasn’t pity they projected. We’re in the same boat, they joked, flashing monitors and oxygen tanks. They were sorry she was so ‘young and unfulfilled’, but didn’t coddle her for it.

After the first two days she was thoroughly tired of medicine balls and Breathing Gym videocassettes. (Who even used VHSs anymore?) Now that she knew the symptoms she began to recognize them everywhere. How walking winded her quickly and stairs nearly set her chest on fire. Fatigue burrowed into her bones and would not release her, even after long hours asleep. She was trapped in bed mostly, begging Jonathan to give her copies of his unfinished homework for the sake of maintaining some normalcy. She was sick of daytime television and gossip magazines. And when she went without either of those distractions it was just her and the condition eating her chest.

Her father was there every day, whenever he could stop by. During breaks, before and after work. He was at the visitors desk before it opened, and was the last to leave at closing time. Sometimes she would wake up from another daytime nap and find him passed out in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs. She never had the heart to wake him, just stewed silently at the frustrating bags under his eyes.

Zack visited once, unsure, with a small bouquet clutched like a shield in both hands. The flowers were unbelievably vibrant and fresh, there was no way they were just from the grocery. He blushed an interesting shade of green and red when she asked where they came from, and skirted the question with zero tact by apologizing again.

“Seriously, shut up.” She plucked a pink flower with a very fine stem from the bunch and violently jabbed it in one of the holes of the silly jersey he wore all the time.

With muted surprise he jerked away, gently adjusting the flower when it tried to escape. “Okay…”

But at night there were no people or echoes of grumpy patients in neighboring rooms or TV static. In the near darkness she played connect the dots with the pockmarks of the ceiling tiles and tried to ignore the obnoxious squeak of night-staff carts meandering through the halls. Leering only in her peripheral was a word, just one string of letters: terminal.

Hell was real and she was in it.

 

No one had visited yet today, but it was only twelve o'clock, and she knew her father didn’t get off work until four. Jonathan hadn’t visited in two days, which was okay, it was better for him. He was probably busy with school or maybe he was looking for another job…

Lil blinked at the sentence she had been reading for the past hour, ripping the magazine completely in half. There wasn’t any feeling in her fingers, and even less in her chest.

It had only been a week since her diagnosis, and already she was going crazy.

Somebody hacked the kind of forced cough her teachers used when trying to catch the attention of a student using their cellphone during class. For a moment she forgot she had been moved to a private room, expecting it to be one of the four occupied beds in the overnight bay. She looked up, eyes blurry with lack of restful sleep, to see a little girl, blonde pigtails and all, standing in the unopened doorway of her room. ‘Standing’ was too hopeful for her situation, since upon closer inspection Lil realized her bare feet were not touching the ground at all. They were hovering at least two inches from the scuffed linoleum.

She met the little girl’s inquisitive eyes with an overblown sigh, tossing the destroyed magazine into the air and coughing deeply. “I’m as sane as a drunk clown right now, aren’t I?”

“Uh,” the little girl’s voice wavered as she floated closer to Lil’s bed, “you’re Magill Nancy, right?”

A page of Beauty FAQs settled across Lil’s eyes. “Yes.” She lifted the corner of the page to see the girl’s cheeks puff huffily. “And what are you? Some ghost?”

The girl flew higher, arms crossed and legs outstretched like gravity was a funny thing. “I’m an angel.”

Lil raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh?”

The girl nodded crisply, lips pursed. “I’m your guardian angel.”

Bones creaked beneath the muffled friction of displaced sheets. A small puff of indignant air and an inevitable cough pulled across her Sahara throat. Wild-honey eyes filled with embers burning low glared between her violaceous prison bar fringe and pinned the girl like an abnormality under her microscope.

"I don't need a guardian angel." More glaring, another cough flinging her hand to the sidetable and scattering the multitude of Get well soon! cards like a vicious flurry of futilely fleeing doves. One even began to sing and she glared at it too as she retracted the shaking hand, judging everything on the nightstand a lost cause. Shoulders hunched to envelop her head and the light frustration dusting her cheeks.

 

Joane smiled gently, uncharacteristically quiet as she shuffled the cards back into place and retrieved the glass of water. "Look," the glass was between them as an olive branch, dripping tears onto the comforter, "I know you're upset with life..." The smile dropped and her eyes wandered. An invisible sigh, and she settled cross-legged at the end of the bed, her presence leaving only a slight dip in the down blanket. Magill continued the wary little glances between her face and the glass, but seemed to relax once Joane was no longer floating. The settling of her shoulders didn't go unnoticed, and Joane began again, easing her body forward to offer the glass more earnestly. "I dunno what you think I do, but I'm here to help you in any way I can."

Magill's frown twisted into a white-toothed strain aimed skyward. "And heaven sent you?"

Sensing the tension build again Joane drew back a bit, but persisted with the glass. An angel’s arms don't grow tired so quickly. "Yes."

"Well," Magill paused to blow a few straggly hairs out of her eyes again, "where were you?"

Joane blinked. "When?"

"When..." It was almost visible, the old rage flung forward like a fiery sun and igniting the calm embers behind her eyes into a roaring firestorm. Her throat bobbed, jaw clenched, hands balling the comforter and locking gazes with Joane, who sat back slack-jawed, unprepared for such raw intensity from someone previously so calm. "When all this began?! _Where were you then?_ When― when they first diagnosed me?! When I went into that house? When they built the damn thing?!" She didn't cry, she wasn't in grief, not yet. "All those times my dad was in here, crying and praying when he thought I was asleep. When I had to tell my friends not to expect me in school because I could be dead soon?! I―" she gulped, "I just got here, I have so many things going for me. My best friend―" she released the crumpled blanket with a sweaty hand that shook as she gazed at it in disbelief, "he's here all the time, but he doesn't know what to do!" A coughing fit drowned out whatever she would have said next.

The cold glass of water was helpful in that it at least masked the rising heat of Joane's body. "Well why are you shouting at me then?" Her brow furrowed, freckles scattering and blending with her reddening skin. These were the sort of depths she drowned in. She wanted to have a nice mono-a-mono with this little ball of misery wasting away in a hospital bed and alternately grip her tight to squeeze all her demons away.

"Because you weren't there." Magill recovered. "If you had been there you could have done something!"

"What?! What are you saying?" Joane spluttered, now the one with hunched shoulders. "I couldn't have done anything! I'm here to help you now, I can't go back in time!" She aborted throwing her hands for emphasis as the glass splashed a few drops.

Magill sat back into the heap of pillows at the head of her bed, suddenly tired. Weary and old, fire burning to embers, enveloped. "Well then why are you here? What can you possibly do now? I'm near the end stages. I―" she gulped, a terrible, dry crackling sound, like parchment baked to mere flakes, "the odds aren't good. For a transplant, or even after, if I did get one."

There was a pregnant pause, in which Magill shut her eyes with a massive sigh and Joane gazed deeply into the glass, wishing it was full of answers, not water. Making a decision, she gripped it with both hands and thrust it closer to Magill's face than the girl's answering reaction suggested she would have liked. Maybe she couldn't do anything about the past, but Magill's file in Heaven was burned into Joane's retinas. They were stuck with each other, something she was honored to recognize, and if it took weeks (or even beyond her mortal life, if Magill's grim prognosis was to be believed) Joane would unravel that angry facade somehow. She would help, she really would. Even if Magill didn't want it.

At her encouraging nod, Magill finally accepted the glass, raising it to her lips to take a few blissful gulps before she overdid herself and coughed again. Dripping from the chin, she gazed resolutely at her lap as she pulled up her jacket sleeve to wipe away the water.

"Okay..." Magill's quiet sigh drew Joane's face closer, and their eyes met, oceans and embers in agreement. "Okay. Do... whatever. Whatever you're going to do." Another hesitant sip from the glass. "It will be nice to have some company anyway." Gestures towards a stack of magazines on the floor, a tight smile. "I never cared about celebrities anyway."

Slowly, haltingly, Joane smiled as the girl's overcast state evaporated and she thrust out a hand. "Well then, we're going to be spending a lot of time together, Magill! My name's Joane (that's with an E by the way, J - O - A - N - E, Joane), but you can call me Jojo."

Lightly, Magill grasped her fingers and shook. "Okay, Jojo. Call me Lil, though, no one calls me Magill."

"Lil." Like a small flower, a vibrant one. "You got it!"

 

Joane hovered in front of the humming microwave, head propped in one hand, eyes drooping. For a quick moment she dropped, but caught herself before she hit the ground, wagging her head to stay alert. The break room was blessedly empty. She wasn’t sure exactly how she would have pulled this off if any living humans had been around. It was a weird request to latch on to, but she was getting stir crazy already and despite her small personal escapades she still needed somewhere to project the energy. The microwave beeped, and she pulled out the flimsy paper plate of grease masquerading as Mexican food.

When she had accepted this job she hadn’t exactly expected to be microwaving taquitos at two in the morning. It was definitely something they should add to the job description. Maybe somewhere under the heading ‘Work-Related Hazards’. Just looking at it was making her chest boil.

She skimmed through the hallways back to Lil’s room, steam trailing behind her like a lost little cloud. Lil was staring blankly at the ceiling when she came in, absently gnawing at the cuff of her bulky, green jacket. The smell of warm meat drew her upright pretty quick, and even if her grin was brittle with exhaustion, it was still a grin.

“Thanks, Jojo.” She took the plate carefully and balanced it on her lap. Abandoning all pretence of caution, she promptly stuffed her face with three at once, spilling filling all over her (thankfully) plated lap.

“Wow.” Joane said, for lack of better reaction.

Lil used a tissue from a nearby dispenser to wipe at her face. “You want one?”

Joane raised a warding hand. “Uh, I don’t think I―”

“Here,” Lil extended a taquito, more deadly than any nuclear weapon, and tossed, “catch.”

Joane caught it alright. Meat spilled over one hand, but none of it hit the floor. She glanced at Lil incredulously. “I’m not even sure if I can eat.”

“You’ll never know unless you try.” Lil encouraged around another mouthful.

The taquito warmed her fingers, just a thought away from the linoleum. So far she’d consumed nothing and been fine. If eating was any trouble, someone would have told her, right? She took a crunchy bite. Chewed thoughtfully. Pushed the rest in her mouth. Licked her hand. It wasn’t filling in the least, but she could taste it. “Huh.”

“See.” Lil administered sagely, plate completely polished off.

Their first meeting was now two days past. Joane could understand her charge’s eternally moody, frustrated state. Being stuck in a bed all day waiting for visitors or doctors was a very cruel existence for a teenager. They had talked a bit about this and that, her prognosis and technical details. Joane knew more than a little bit about her best-boyfriend, some Jonathan kid, who appeared to be a source of frustration and comfort all at once.

“Why don’t you just ask him to come over if you really wanna see him so bad?” Joane shrugged, uncomfortable with relationship-type things.

“I don’t want to bother him.” Lil worried.

Joane squinted speculatively. “That’s what text messaging is for. This is the twenty-first century. He’ll tell you if he doesn’t want to hang, right?”

“Yeah,” Lil sighed, “but I was thinking… That maybe we shouldn’t, you know, be together. If I’m going to d―” she choked on the word, a wet awkward gulp that triggered a cough, “if I’m not going to make it.”

Joane’s chest filled with concern, both for Lil as she groped for a glass of water and the precarious situation. “That sounds like something you should both decide, don’t you think?”

“He’ll say no.” Lil took a quick swig. “He’s stubborn like that. Separation issues, I think.”

“Well, do you want to break up with him?” The window curtains fluttered gently as Joane floated by.

“No. Not really…” Lil deflated.

Joane threw her hands up in the air, surrendering it all to Providence. This was not in her training anywhere. Also, it was stupid.

“Hey, it’s more complicated than just ‘I like him / he likes me’.” Lil retaliated defensively, shouldering further into her jacket.

Joane gazed flatly at her charge. “I’m sorry, I don’t really see how.”

The door opened. “Hey honey, I’m back.” It was Mr. Nancy, shrugging out of a coat. Lil jerked her head, the universal sign for We’ll continue later, smiling for her father. “Hey, dad.”

He ruffled her hair and bent down to kiss her forehead. “Jonathan asked me to apologize for his absence lately. He’ll stop in tomorrow.” Distracted by pulling up a chair, he didn’t see his daughter’s face cringe in panic. “I’m going down the street for a sandwich and coffee, you want anything?”

“Pizza sandwich? With pickles?” she hoped, voice strangled.

Her father winced, more so at the choice than the way she said it. “Sure thing, sweetie.”

“Well I’m not sure about dating,” Joane broke the tense silence after he left, “but if there’s anything else I can do to help…?”

Lil stared at her lap, thinking. Spiraling deep. “Well, there might be one little thing… Kinda stupid really…”

“I’ll do it,” Joane jumped, fluttering higher in the air with anticipation, “just tell me.”

Lil raised her right wrist, pointing at a nearly invisible tan line. “You might have trouble finding it, but I’ll tell you where to look…”

 

The back hallways of the school were unnervingly silent, all sound absorbed by the pockmarked concrete walls, painted over so many times that it puckered slightly in spots heavy with the off-white, shiny paint. Stacks of chairs lined the right wall like looming sentries, some ready to topple at the slightest hint of force. Empty trash cans full of chewed gum and beat up service carts were parked near a heavy set of double doors, likely leading to a loading dock. Ghosts of ripped cardboard and sawdust tickled the inside of his nose and dry eyes, drawing a light sheen of saline tears to the edges of his eyelids. With a scoff he rubbed them away. This was bad enough without looking like a weepy stoner.

He came to the room, shuffling quietly just outside the door, before pushing it open, wincing at the creaking hinges. It opened into a tiny, unused classroom. An old piano was pushed up against the southern wall, wood cracked and finish chipped. Jonathan knew from experience that it was horribly out of tune and that the worn keys functioned best as bloodthirsty teeth. Hiding on the slick, painted brick behind it was a stark, guilty boot mark, one that they just couldn’t wash off. A window dominated the next wall, curtains eternally drawn, the joints of the function that operated them rusted shut. Thin stripes of sunlight still found a way around the edges, bathing the room in an orange glow. Directly in a swathe of light was a low, bulging old sofa, nearly shapeless with age. It wasn’t really a color. If anything, it was stain colored. Assorted stored items littered the walls in in various states of dilapidation. Erupting stacks of boxes were overturned on some chairs, pouring in a small hill towards the foot of the couch.

Sock flew deeper into the room, scarf wagging behind his back like an odd cape. “Wow. So what’s this place?”

Jonathan wiped at his face again. Damn dust tears. “Lil and I hang here all the time.” Between classes, during lunches, free period, after school. Whenever they felt like it. Technically the room fell under the music department’s jurisdiction, but if any of the teachers knew they used it no objections had been raised, and really it was only a storage space.

“That’s nice.” The demon perched on top of the mountain of boxes. “So why are we here?”

Jonathan rummaged through a pile of spare cart wheels, most of them clogged and useless with lint and gum. “I’m going to get something for Lil,” he shared, nicking his hand on something sharp. He pulled the hand out with a slight hiss, examining the shallow cut. “She didn’t ask for it but I’m sure she’ll want it later.”

“That’s very sweet of you.” Sock hummed, swinging his legs. Jonathan hopped to his feet again, meaning to search the couch cushions, when the air froze. Atop his messy throne, Sock was stock still, back ramrod straight, eyes wide and mouth caught in an ‘O’ of shock. His eyes darted to the door, mouth snapping shut with an audible click of teeth.  “Jonathan,” he said slowly, “we should hide.”

Jonathan straightened from his stoop near the sofa. “Why?”

With a frantic lurch into the air, Sock barreled through Jonathan’s chest, surprising an undignified squeak from his throat. The entire world tipped to the side as he fell back onto his butt, abused for the second time this week. It made its discontent known when a sharp pain shot up his spine, and Jonathan hissed air through his clenched teeth.

Brisk rustling, a muffled sneeze. Someone else was in the room. Luckily, Jonathan’s little tumble had placed him in the small space behind the couch, so whoever it was couldn’t see him from the main part of the room. Which raised a few questions, but mainly: how had they got in without alerting him? The door was un-oiled and creaky, he definitely would have heard it open.

He took Sock’s actions into consideration. The demon had sensed the intruder before seeing them. Or at least Jonathan assumed (and maybe hoped) that was what the panic was for. He didn’t want to ponder what other unearthly things could make a demon from Hell seek shelter.

Plucking up a few blades of courage, Jonathan peeked around the side of the sofa. Dust motes swung lazily through the undisturbed air, streaking grey threads of shadow through the afternoon light beaming from the windows. Sock was nowhere to be found, probably hiding somewhere with that stupid cowlick held flat to his head. Feeling reassured when no monsters popped out of the shadows to rip off his head, he rose from his low crouch to a kneeling position. He peered above the back of the couch and there, standing with hands on hips cocked like the sassiest of cheerleaders, was a little girl. Surprise sucked his lips shut, and momentarily he forgot how to breathe. Normally he wouldn’t be this panicked about a kid standing in front of him, but she was floating at least a foot off the ground, bare toes flexing in total ignorance of gravity. Her back was to him. She seemed to be thinking.

Jonathan warily observed the bouncing of her blonde pigtails as she shook her head, slowly lowering himself behind the sofa again, praying that whatever she was would leave him alone. As though she heard the internal pleas, she performed a lazy zero-gravity backflip, catching his eyes just before he was completely behind the couch again. He slid all the way behind the useless barrier, her stern blue eyes washing out his thoughts like a pulsing sea, before sighing with annoyance. Dammit. She knew he was here. Nothing for it then.

Jonathan pulled himself to his feet, clearing his throat. “Hey, what’re you?”

The girl had floated away, backside facing him again, but once he spoke she spun in an exaggerated pirouette back in his direction. For a moment her face was old and bored, disgruntled with his existence and ready to leave, by the set of her jaw. Then their eyes locked, and her face registered nothing but slackjawed surprise.

“ _Me?_ ” she squeaked.

Jonathan winced at the register. Definitely middle school. “Yeah, no, I’m talking to the sofa.”

Her fingers clenched, cheeks puffing against his sharp sarcasm. “I’m an angel, you butt-muncher.” In a snap she was inches from his face. “And you?” she prodded aggressively, “What’re you? How can you see me?”

“Um,” Jonathan shuffled nervously away from her irascible aura, “I’m human. And I can see you because you’re right here.”

She eagerly followed his backwards motion, entirely ignoring his obvious discomfort. “But that’s not how it works, you must be different.”

Sick of trying to move and getting no more personal space than before, Jonathan squashed the urge to run to hide like Sock and stood his ground. The self-proclaimed angel inched closer. He narrowed his eyes. Her nose wrinkled with disgust. “You smell terrible.”

“Hey,” Jon shoved his hands self-consciously into his pockets, “I’m sure you’re no daisy either.”

“No no,” she insisted, finally backing away, “you smell really bad. You smell like…” A considering pause. Understanding lit her eyes with acidic revulsion. “You smell like a demon.”

Raising an eyebrow, Jonathan lifted his arm and sniffed the pit disinterestedly. “Really.”

“Hmph.” Her freckled arms crossed below a cantankerous pout. “Whatever.” She dove through his stomach, turning her nose up at his outcry of revulsion, and phased through the wall behind him without further ado.

Jonathan shuddered, forever sick of the weird not-feeling of demons (and now angels too) deciding to waltz through his internal organs. Cautiously, he waited a few seconds, just to make sure she didn’t come back, before turning to finally search the couch. All the usual pockets were empty (except for a completed old English assignment), prompting him to flop on the deflated cushions in despair.

“Uggghh where did I leave it?!” When he opened his eyes again, a familiar face floated above. “Coward.” He groaned at Sock, sitting up with a wince. “You ran away.”

“You bet I did.” The demon freely admitted. “Angels can be fierce.” When Jonathan didn’t reply, busying himself with brushing sofa stuffing off his jeans, Sock cocked his head carefully. “What did the angel look like?”

Jonathan shrugged flippantly. “I dunno. Short, blonde.”

Sock frowned. “You just described half of Hollywood.”

“Gah, does it even matter?” Jonathan snapped, hard pressed to remain amicable after all the weirdness of an angel and not finding the thing he originally came for.

Silence. Then a thoughtful, “No. I guess not in the end.”

Jonathan crouched on the floor, stewing in miserable thought. His pocket buzzed, and he fished out his cell phone to view the text. It was Aunt Em, telling him that she would be home late and that there was a green bean casserole in the fridge if he wanted to warm it up for dinner. He slid his thumb across the screen, shooting back a quick reply (one letter long: “k”) and opened up the web browser, Googling “angels”.

“Sock?” he asked, trying for casual. The demon sat down in front of him, for once granting physics some sort of hold, making a quizzical noise in reply. “What do you know about angels?”

Sock shrugged. “Well they’re widely regarded as the ‘good’ ones in any fight, and people are generally more happy to see them than demons. Entirely reasonable.” Jonathan scrolled through a long, boring Wikipedia article, noticing sources time and again referring to the bible. “They’ve got wings, sometimes, and halos, which can do a lot of damage. They usually only come down to Earth to be guardians over a human or deliver miracles.”

Jon tipped his head with interest, bangs bouncing across his vision, eyes still locked on the screen. “Miracles?”

“Yeah.” Sock elaborated. “Like surviving car accidents, or getting cured, or―”

He turned to the demon, eyes glinting gunflint in the warm noon light. What he needed was a miracle. "Call her back."

Sock shook his head, the corners of his mouth weighed down with vexation, guessing his line of thought. "That's not how they work. Heaven's a lofty bunch, locked up high in their golden cities with that choosy God of theirs. They help when it's convenient, not when they're needed." The frown deepened with trenches of bitter memories. "I would know."

The maw of night ― a sterile, impersonal room. The only signs of life Jon’s labored breath and her beeping monitor. Prayer to Someone or Anything long abandoned. Chill sunk deep into his bones, but not nearly as cold as the hand he held, once full of near-volcanic life ( _ruffling his hair, gently stroking his mud and blood face, unyielding walls within the gale_ ) now tattered sails hung exhausted over a ship's bones. Deserting faith in Heaven was where their histories ran parallel, though drawing level on a moral plane with a damned soul had not exactly been in his mind when embarking on this escapade.

He hopped upright and spun away on his heel, shoving the phone back in his pocket. “Well then what are you here for, you useless freak.”

The demon’s previously distant expression tore a Cheshire grin, glinting with a suggestion of fangs. “To fulfill whatever it was you fell to infernal means to achieve.” He delivered the words with glee. “You’re the first who’s willing to really give something up for this.”

“The first _ever?_ ”

Sock shook his head. “Nah, the first of my counterparts.” He took to the air again, face pensive. “C’mon, Jon. You didn’t find what you wanted here. Let’s go.”

Unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of a blunt suggestion, Jon grumbled and made up for it by being the first out the door. Sock followed and stopped at the doorway, glancing once back into the room, before hurrying to catch up.

“There are some pretty high rafters in there, Jon. All you’d need is some rope.”

“Shut up, Sock.”

 

She said something about bronchiole and tissue scarring, asked kindly how the new medication was treating her, adjusted the tube in Lil’s nose. Joane didn’t particularly care, and spent most of the visit blowing on the doctor’s hair and snickering when she turned with furrowed brow and grumbled about the broken ventilation system. Lil’s answers were terse and sharp and more than a few glares came Joane’s way, but also one or two puffs of amused breath.

The doctor left with the click of her pen.

“Don’t do that again.” Lil said stonily. She fretted with the bracelet on her wrist for a moment, the one she had asked Joane to retrieve from the school, frowning.

Joane’s smile died slowly. “Why?”

Lil sighed and rolled to face the frosted window. “It’s weird.”

The angel wrinkled her nose curiously, wondering when her charge had depressed so far. For a moment Lil’s labored breathing and the hypnotic up-down motion of her curled back filled Joane’s senses, before she floated to the end of the bed with considering features regarding her lap. “Well,” she started quietly, feeling the need to address the most likely reason for Lil’s mood, “it’s not really all that bad.” The bed grunted as Lil shifted onto her back again. “I mean, it’s bad that it’s happening to you so early, but―” she picked at her sleeve, “after the whole deal is over with, you can move on, ya’ know? Or at least try.”

Lil blinked. Countless comforts had been handed to her ever since her sentence, but no one had gone anywhere close to insinuating she could move on from her own death. “Huh.” A thought struck. “You were alive once, Joane.”

Said girl crossed her arms quickly. “Of course.”

There was a pause as Lil reconsidered her line of thought. Perhaps it would be rude to ask, but curiosity was eating her up. “How did you die…?” She watched Joane’s slack hands, resting on either side of her lap as she sat crosslegged. They flexed, digits bowing and clawing at air like the final convulsions of a spider, before she unsteadily clasped them together, shifting her entire being deeper into the comforter.

Lil’s throat twitched. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s okay if―”

“No,” Joane’s voice cut steadily through her backtracking, “no, it’s okay. It would probably help you, to hear about my experience. That’s what I’m here for anyway, right? To help you.” She didn’t so much scoff as sigh in morbid amusement.

Another long stretch of quiet and loud breath. Joane’s cerulean blues cast side to side, fishing for a start in her tale before popping her lips in frustration, choosing to dive right in and feel her way through.

“Lil, how old do you think I am?” She raised a brow. “Honestly?”

Haltingly, Lil shrugged. “Well, you’re definitely older than ten.” Somewhere through her sixth sense she heard one of Joane’s veins burst at being compared in some small way to a ten year old, and she cracked a wry smirk. “But you can’t be older than eighteen…” She cocked her head, earning a short cough, and squinted at the huffy little angel glaring back at her. “Sixteen? Seventeen?” Suspicion pursed her lips. “...fifteen?”

Joane snapped her fingers. “Thirteen when I died. I dunno how old now, or if it even counts.”

“Huh, you don’t seem thirteen.” Lil rubbed an eye. “Or maybe my eyesight is going too.”

Jojo glanced down at her body. “I don’t think I’ve changed?” She shrugged and looked to Lil. “Maybe I’ve matured but I don’t look different.”

“Don’t angels get,” Lil gestured vaguely to her back, “wings, or something?”

Joane practically lit up. “Yeah! I’ve got wings.”

“Can I see them?” Lil tilted her head curiously, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards with the little angel’s infectious mood.

“No.” Joane sighed with disappointment.

Lil’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Why not?”

Joane cupped her eyes. “Well first of all you’d probably go blind, and you’ve got enough going on with your body without loss of eyesight.” She peeked out between her fingers, noticing her charge’s amending frown. “And second it’s kinda hard for me to summon them in a physical realm. Too much stuff impeding them here, like _matter_.” She sneered in the face of projected reality. “I could if I really had to, but I don’t want to. They’re really more decorative than anything.”

Silence. A resigned breath.

“It wasn’t good.” Joane began, eyes averted. “I was murdered.”

Lil remained respectfully attentive.

“The one who did it, he was my friend, I guess…” Her mouth twisted into a wry smirk. “I can’t believe I ever let him get into my head like that. He didn’t seem so bad. A little weird, maybe. But not evil.” Unconsciously, Joane’s hand sought the left side of her head. “It hurt.”

From the other side of the door, footsteps hurried past, the only sound in the void after her words.

She didn’t know where he found the bat. Probably picked it up off the curb or someone’s Halloween lawn ornaments. Tomorrow they were trick or treating together with Abuela. As always they were ready to terrorize the neighborhood, this time as a Peter Pan and a fairy princess. Abuela had assisted them in making the costumes, handling glue gun misfires and tulle explosions with all the grace of a nun.

It would make more sense, she claimed, if he were something like a superhero.

You’re Peter Pan, he pointed out reasonably. We don’t need sense.

Fair is fair, she relented.

Looking back perhaps it wasn’t strange they were invariably attracted to one another. They were odd in ways that discouraged popularity. Destiny spun her web so they met eventually. Of course, that didn’t mean she had to like it.

“We saw a new movie.” Joane continued. “It was all stop motion. A skeleton guy trying to steal Christmas.” It had been strange, but she enjoyed it. She shifted atop the comforter, throat filled with marbles. “There was this huge flood. Our town was on a big hill, so it wasn’t as affected as the rest of the region.”

Water tumbled through lowland houses. Their little town stood just above it all like an island of sanctuary. Soggy refugees from drowning parts were everywhere, arriving almost daily in rescue boats, clinging to family and the few belongings they could salvage. The community center and school was full of them. Joane had accompanied her mother to a session serving food at their local soup kitchen, spending the night aghast at the line stretching across more than three blocks.

Halloween would not be cancelled, however. Local volunteers collected candy and costume donations for the displaced people and opened up her neighborhood as the chosen trick or treating location. Which made their costume choices extra important that year, since so many new people would see them.

Joane’s brow furrowed with thought. “Our parents shouldn’t have let us off alone,” she admitted, “I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a murderer, being surrounded by strangers and floodwaters isn’t exactly safe for kids.” She shrugged. Too late now. “We were walking home from the movie, thought it would be cool to check out the barrier nearby keeping the water at bay.”

The air carried a pungent scent entirely foreign to her young palate. Rot, dirt, minerals. Floodwaters. She was hooked on the alluring tang of innocent adventure. Nagging at the back of her head was a cautious thought. It said, Hey. You know what’s a bad idea? Going to an unsafe area in the dark.

The thought went ignored. His eyes were excited, lit from inside with a kind of happiness she hadn’t seen since that one weird incident with the dead squirrel. He spun around, skirt flaring, wooden baseball bat throwing him quickly off balance, tossing him flat onto his face in the mud. She laughed. What a klutz. As long as she kept an eye on his fumbling feet nothing could possibly go wrong. In agreement they veered from the well lit sidewalk into the shadowy forest, following the enticing sound of rushing water.

“Everything was fine when we got there.” Joane wrinkled her nose. “The ground was nasty.”

Feet sunk up to the ankles in mud thick as chocolate cake batter, sucking at appendages with hungry slurps. Once upon a time it had been a verdant field of soybeans. Rising like a broken barricade was the grim pile of sandbags, stretching for miles, broken only by hills that could fend for themselves. The portion they approached was assisted by some crooked cement dividers and streamers of yellow caution tape. Suspiciously chunky beige water gurgled from a few holes in the lonely wall, soaking the nearby ground into the messy stew they stood in.

Being the most daring of the pair, Joane was accustomed to taking initiative. Shucked to the side were her sneakers, splashing dirty water all over her ankles, which were already crusted with mud. She wriggled her toes into the cool muck with relish before mounting the wall. It was at least two heads taller than her. Its tumbling state of decay gave her plenty of gritty handholds. She reached the wide top in under a minute. With a cry of triumph she plopped to her bum, bare heels skimming the roiling water below. Aloud she wondered if he needed any help, but didn’t bother to turn and ask, too preoccupied with the electric pride swelling her heart at the sight of the dangerous floodwaters so close.

A minute passed before she realized he hadn’t answered her.

She turned to seek him out, hoping to end the unnerving quiet. Something connected with the side of her head, spiderwebbing white hot pain across her vision and filling her ears with distant television static. For a brief moment in her shock the noise cleared, revealing the wielder of the blunt object. His face was blank, watching her totter on the edge with lips pursed in concentration. The bat was still wound up behind his head, blood sliding across the end in testament to the incredible force behind the swing.

“He, uh…” Joane gulped, the sound too loud in the heavy silence. “He hit me in the head. _Hard_.”

 _Sock_ … She croaked, nerves razed and sparking spastically. Insensate fingers scrabbled along the slick edge of the barrier, too numb to latch onto a better grip. The entire world tunneled and spun too fast, flip-flopping her sight from total blindness to unnatural accuracy. One heartbeat was void, the next she was submerged in utter chaos, too aware, with the answers to everything. Everything except...

_Why?_

 

She fell.

 

Beneath the glacial water was total blackness, monstrous debris flying past too fast to comprehend, ripping at her skin and clothes. The current dragged her to the bottom, knocking her already injured head against a cluster of rocks and whisking her into a steep outcropping of submerged trees before shooting her to the surface again, roaring as her head broke to air. Her skin stung with cuts and cold and her aching eyes rolled. What little breath there was in her abused lungs escaped in a violent puff of mist when the water yanked her down again. This time it did not feel the need to tease her with escape, simply rushing her against an invisible barrier, pressure pinning her body against it. A panicked cough wrought a reflexive breath, bringing only icy water into her lungs. Instinct demanded she vomit, but more water forced itself up her nose as she did. Deep within her chest grew a terrible pressure, like the tearing of empty hunger clawing through fragile organs. The baseball bat’s footprint spread an odd crawling sensation through her nerves. Water was in places it should never be, dripping like melting ice into her veins.

Through the whirlwind shone a single, clear thought. _I’m going to die._

Something heavy collided with her stomach, a sharp piece of debris. The shock rippled through her limbs, buzzing the ends of her toes and fingers like static electricity, numbing all sensation. There was a single, surreal moment where she realized her head was no longer bleeding. A detached thought wiggled her stiff fingers, and with sickening effort she batted the something away from her midriff. Her limbs grew leaden and warm, ears tuned out the sound of the moving water. The writhing darkness surrounding her faded into a more comforting ashen gray. Steady from the base of her very being thundered a timid tattoo of life, thunking hollowly against her flesh. _Ba-dum. Ba-dum_.

It stopped.

She was no longer pinned, but floating, unmoored. A warm, incorporeal hand gave her a gentle nudge.

 _Life_ , crackled the warmth, earthy brown. _And your time After_ , buzzed the ghost digits, translucent afterimages. There was a tangerine smile, sharp like a shark’s.

Something tugged her legs, a stream of buffeting gravity, and she whisked away.

 _Say hi for me!_ echoed the smile.

She tumbled to the floor, dripping and gasping and bleeding, eyes engorged and nearly blind. Her skin was soggy and ill-fitting, sliding across her frame like a suit of slime. Every empty breath was hunger and green with raw want; she knew she didn’t need air, but she could not give it up, always begging more, denying that a part of her was gone. Like slick snakes her wild hair slithered unbound across her face and sensitive neck, drawing a shuddering sob from her concave chest.

Drunkenly she attempted to climb to her feet, achieving only a low crouch on all fours, muscles rotting with phantom entropy.

 _I’m dead_ , she affirmed, voice broken bits of self, _I’m dead I’m dead and **he** did it_.

Ripped from the core of her being―a mounting animal yell, a scream, a roar of grieving horror, revulsion, anger. It vibrated across her wonky skin and shook her teeth with decibels unknown to man. Her lungs had no need to reinflate. Her ears couldn’t fully comprehend the unearthly noise. Nothing was stopping her. Beneath her ribs, in that sacred position previously housing the drumbeat of life, a malignant ball of fire crisped the edges of her conscience, filling her mouth with the throbbing scent of coppery blood. She hacked and coughed, the terrible howl quavering into a choked gasp. Her hands slipped in the water pooling beneath her and she fell to her elbows, forehead smacking the ground with a dead, wet thud.

She expected silence. Instead, from nearby came the soft patter of bare feet on linoleum. Quick and light, reminiscent of the scuffle of a bird. A cautious approach, weight on the air near her arm, but not touching.

“Jojo?” It was Lil. Worried.

“I―” She fought the strangled tone in her voice, struggling to pull away from recollection. “I fell, drowned. Died, you know? I went to heaven.” Sweat coated her palms, squeaking her skin when she rubbed them together. Nice tight skin. A slightly unhinged laugh.

The hand hovered over her unresponsive shoulder. A woman’s voice said something softly. It wasn’t enough to puncture her sallow haze. From between her slimy hair she watched a human-shaped shadow crouch by her head. Summer permeated her palate, mellow like sweet clover honey in a hayfield, and she gagged around the stinging brackish taste that rushed to meet it.

 _Breathe, sweetheart, remember fresh air._ Fresh air? _Crisp mornings full of fog and dewy fragrant flowers, remember filling your chest._

Joane gasped, chest swelling with sharp, ebony pain. Pitch dripped from a nostril and the side of her slack mouth. In one, huge cough she emptied a small pond onto the floor, the water brown and swimming with decomposed bits of plant.

More encouraging words. Joane’s ears began to clear like coming down from a high altitude or deep beneath the sea. Remember, it told her, you can remember. You can do it.

In the bathtub, when hands turn to raisins, and afterwards, when the skin is shiny and taut once dehydrated. Wrapped in a dry towel, radiating warmth. Homely nights soaking in wide, easy space. That stupid casserole burning for the umpteenth time, overwhelming and familiar. Not rushing floodwater, but a dripping faucet. _Can you remember?_

Of course.

She fell back on her knees, skin snugly in place, still wet, but no longer a melting mess. Her eyes remained unblinking, swollen orbs. The human-shaped shadow asked permission. Joane merely cocked her head forward in a pale rendition of a nod. Gentle fingers cupped her eyes. Around the beginning of her quiet hiccups, the voice softly whispered tales of an exotic circus, all colors and spectacles and light, amazing to see. Something to see. _You can see._

She was the first thing Joane saw again.

“Um…” Joane clawed at her sides, arms crossed. She had been quiet too long again. “You get a case manager. Sorta like a parole officer but they want you to talk about ‘your feelings’.” She rolled her eyes, attempting to lighten the mood again. “They usually greet you when you first show up. Mine did anyway.” Lil was watching her carefully, perhaps noticing the cracks in her usual facade. Cracks dripping stale trauma. Cracks in need of a new veneer of paint.

“I’m sorry about the whole dying thing.” Lil floundered in the wake of her story.

Joane shrugged, eyes cast to the ceiling tile and expression considering. “Don’t be, it happens to all of us.”

Lil opened her mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. “I… I guess you’re right.” She fiddled with the comforter, drawing it closer around her lap. “I’m sorry you had to go in such a bad way then.”

Joane sighed. “Stop apologizing, I’m supposed to be helping you.” She lifted off the end of the bed, the comforter instantly forgetting her ethereal presence. “You get your own room. Ah… There are lots of things to do. Choir, everyone seems to love that. Like me, you could apply to be a guardian angel.” The window curtains, while drawn, were nearly threadbare. Midday light wafted through them. Funny, it felt like years since they had begun her story. “But it can get a bit boring.”

“Heaven,” Lil scoffed, coughing, “boring? Isn’t it supposed to be, like, paradise?”

“Well, yeah,” Joane reclined in the air, “but you can only hear _The Singing Heart_ so many times. And everybody’s always so calm. Nothing happens. Like, the best you can do is talk to people.”

“Speaking of people: what about family?” Lil leaned in grimly. “Do you stick around your parents?”

The angel shook her head. “They’re not dead yet.”

“Oh.” Lil looked embarrassed. “Well, do you ever miss them?”

“Yeah.” Joane sighed. “A lot. But, you’ve just gotta hope that they stay good down here, and end up in the same place as me, ya know?” She watched Lil―her careful breath, her reflective gaze. Somewhere deep and dusty, kindle stirred with smolder. That spot full of grinding not-heart consuming her since her earliest moments after death jumped a little, not calming, but drawn to the smolder. There was something more to all this. More than rancor. Her lips quirked down. It had been difficult to secure this position. Sure, her reasons for fighting to get Lil as her charge weren’t entirely pure; she had always intended on fulfilling her duties, but she hadn’t expected to grow so… fond. There was something about this that felt suspiciously like a strategic move. She remembered the enigmatic grin she had ignored upon receiving the news that she was newly earthbound. Now, uncomfortably gripping the side of her head, she reconsidered her priorities. She burned for rightful returns and longed for another moment with Lil. She bit her lip. Perhaps she could put off her plans for a while…

As if sensing her thoughts, Lil cleared her throat, then wheezed. “Where do you go when you’re not with me?”

“What?” Joane reeled away, defensive. “I don’t go anywhere.”

Lil cocked her head disbelievingly. “You’re not always here. Sometimes when I wake up I’m alone. Or when I go to breathing class you don’t stick around. So,” she narrowed her gaze, “where do you go?”

Joane fumed for a moment, grumbling to herself, but remembered the new smolder. “I’m… looking for someone,” she gave. Lil had been brutally honest with her from the get-go. She could be lax with her thoughts every once in awhile.

“Who?” Lil leaned in.

“Somebody,” Joane snapped. Lax but not too lax. She wasn’t going to go blurting things willy-nilly.

“Well okay,” Lil huffed, shifting to face away from the angel. The bed creaked and the tube up her nose, always there but nearly invisible with time, pulled taut.

Upset that the atmosphere had evaporated, Joane momentarily rolled in the air. Couldn’t something just stay with her for once? Mind made up and bracing herself to apologize, she was interrupted by the door clattering open. Both girls turned to face the nurse in the doorway, who was dragging a wheeled oxygen canister behind her and smiling warmly.

“Lil dear, it’s time for your class.”

Lil’s brows steepled and she frowned, appearing so distressed in that second that Joane was tempted to do her very best to push the stupid nurse right back out the door. Then the expression melted away and she was annoyed again, fumbling the covers off her legs and standing without looking at the angel even once.

“Okay,” she sighed.

The nurse hooked her tube up to the canister and both left. Joane floated numbly to the end of the bed, staring at the door as the wheels squeaked away. She couldn’t lie to Lil. She couldn’t put it off. It was one or the other.

Joane watched Lil’s indent in the bed slowly fill in. One… or the other…

 

Lil’s best-boyfriend finally stopped by the next day. Joane had been on the receiving end of _a look_ , one that said _I’m going to ask you for privacy_. Which really meant _get the hell outta here_. Still torn up from yesterday Joane huffed and instead hid behind the table and bed in the opposite end of the room, ignoring Lil’s exasperated sigh and trying to retain her composure when it triggered a full-body coughing fit. _C’mon_ , she thought, hearing the boy enter the room and fuss over her charge, _remember your breathing exercises_. The coughing eventually calmed to wheezes and he laughed tightly with her.

They talked for a bit about school and other kids and parents. Lil’s answers to questions were short and trite. When any subject even vaguely approaching her condition came up she averted attention abruptly. If the Jonathan kid registered it he was kind enough to just go along with her. That wasn’t a half bad trait, Joane grudgingly admitted. But, she still didn’t like him. He smelled like a rat. Something about his presence was familiar―familiar as in recently, but also something older and nastier.

“Hey,” he said, voice catching in surprise, “you’re wearing the bracelet.” The one Joane had collected from the school.

Lil puffed an amused breath. “Yeah. Sorry I forgot it at school.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly expecting to be―” the air thickened, “suddenly inconvenienced…”

“I guess not.”

Jonathan started to say something, but Lil took a sharp breath and began in a strangled tone. “Hey Jonathan? I’ve been thinking about our relationship…”

“What about it?” His voice was steady, unsuspecting.

“I’m not―” She stopped for a few breaths. “I’m not going to get out of this all bright eyed and… and alive.”

“Don’t talk like that, Lil, of course you―”

“No I won’t, Jon!” she snarled. “I won’t be okay, this isn’t curable, there’s not going to be medicine or surgery for this, this is it. Don’t… don’t tell me I’m going to be okay, I can’t hope like that. Jon, I care about you a lot, and I’m sorry that what’s happening to me is going to hurt you…”

“Lil…” His voice wasn’t much better than hers.

“And that’s why!” She yelled as though mere speech would break her. “ _That’s why we’re through!_ ”

Joane counted off the seconds in her head, staring at a puce spot on the wall. 20… 25… 30…

“You’re breaking up with me?” he finally whispered.

“Yes,” she mumbled.

50… 55… 60…

A screech as his chair pushed across the floor. Rustling fabric, a creak of the open door.

“Fine,” he muttered. Then, to himself: “C’mon, I’m ready to cash in on the deal.”

“What? Wait, Jon!”

Joane emerged from hiding to see Lil at the edge of her bed and the door wide open.

“Now he’s talking to himself. That went well,” Joane bit out caustically. Lil’s frantic expression ate up the door. The angel rolled her eyes with a world-weary sigh. “You better go after him.”

She sat in the corner, watching her charge fumble the tube out of her nose and stumble into her shoes and jacket, taking off like an unstable ice skater. Quiet settled over the room, inviting reflection. Joane didn’t feel very inclined to follow immediately, eternally stuck in the age of ignorance when relationships came into play. The wall could only hold her interest for so long though, and she grumbled when worry reared in her chest.

She tumbled through the wall, leisurely following Lil’s footprints in the light powder.

Time to make sure nobody died.

 

Lil huffed and puffed as roiling cold air refused to entirely fill her lungs. Rising steam obscured her vision every few seconds, but she was focused on the ground, recognizing the print of Jonathan’s sneakers. They weren’t very far apart, his pace was brisk but not running. They meandered around the hospital, away from the road leading back into town, and towards the woods. What in the world…?

She paused at the first line of trees to catch her breath, desperately utilizing her breathing techniques, before sucking in as much air as she could and following his trail into the trees. As the footprints became fresher, the air grew thin like bare electrified wires, irritating her lips with biting little sparky kisses. Crusty snow paved the corridor between trees, broken only by a single pair of prints. Jon’s. Wind whisked straggly hair across her numb face, dragging the sound of voices across the landscape. She was close.

Carved from the labyrinthine wood was a clearing, stark white with undisturbed snow and vast in its emptiness, save two figures dwarfed at the center. Too loud was the breath in her ears. Stifling it wasn’t a choice since it was already inadequate. Fortunately, the pair in the clearing seemed too engrossed in discussion to take notice of her crunchy, gasping approach.

There was Jonathan, fresh from the breakup, shivering in his too-thin hoodie. His jaw was stiff, biting words in half like an avid executioner. The bags under his eyes seemed heavier than possible. He’d only left the room minutes ago. At his feet soaking miserably in the snow was a large book, gray of age and waterstain.

But the real kicker was the other person in the clearing. At least, she hoped it was a person. It was… floating. It smiled. Jon frowned. They spoke. Apprehensive and light headed, she walked into the clearing.

“Jon?”

He froze, then whirled to fully face her. “Lil.” He craned his neck to glance behind her. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be out of the hospital.”

“Yeah, well. You’re acting really weird.” She spared a wary look at the floating one. “Who, or what, is that?”

Jon followed her eyes, meeting the gaze of the other person. Both of their eyes widened in shock. “Wait,” Jon stood straighter, eyebrows lowered, “you can see him?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss a floating person, so yeah…” she trailed off. “Am I not supposed to? Who is he?”

“He’s, uh…”

“ _Don’t. Lie._ ” She recognized that tone.

Jon threw his arms in the air. “Fine,” he growled. “This is Sock, a demon I summoned from Hell to heal you.” Her bewildered expression was not lost on him. It seemed to fuel something he’d been suppressing, and with a bitter smirk he let it go.

“So get this,” he began, pacing towards her with deceptive calm. “One day you’re suddenly terminal, and I’m not okay with that, such a thing is not going to happen to you. And all the surgeries and meds in the world won’t do any good, and I wait and I worry and I think about you and how bleak the world would be without your laugh and I imagine your reaction to finding you’ll be okay again. And I can trust your anger at the price but I don’t care. I can stand that. What I cannot stand,” his voice broke, “what I _cannot stand_ is a day without the pulse under your skin or the breath in your chest.” He stood a yard from her, breath sharp and eyes red and gray and blue like a neglected bruise. His shoulders slumped as the floating person—Sock—approached cautiously from behind.

She raised a hand to his remonstrations, pinching the bridge of her nose like his massive stupidity caused her physical pain. "Jonathan," her voice wavered, cracking to a higher octave, "Jonathan you idiot."

Flush colored his bleached parchment cheeks, heightening the darkness under his resolute eyes. "Hey, you're dying, what did you think I would do?"

Her face ruptured inwards like a crumpled blanket, ditches digging of smoldering russet frustration through her carefully maintained façade. It was the unfettered rage cresting over her eyes that stuttered Jonathan's scrambling mind to a halt. There were too many nights of bleak grief and hopeless worry swimming in her iris.

"What did I think you would do...? What did I think you would do? Not summon a fucking demon! How does your mind entirely bypass a logical plan?! Just 'oh my friend is in trouble, better sell my soul to Satan before all other conventional means'! Do you even know the consequences of this?"

“Yes,” was his simple reply. He was ready to accept anything.

She kicked the snow fiercely, eyes ablaze on him. "I was hoping once all this―" she waved her hands to dismissively encompass their entire trainwreck of a life "―was over, we could, you know..." she averted her eyes to the ground, "hang out in heaven together eventually…"

"Whoa, wait." Jonathan latched onto the distraction. "Now you're talking about the afterlife? I thought you didn't believe in that stuff."

Lil shrugged openly, wind blowing powder around her shoes. "I guess my views kinda changed. You can't stay the same forever."

Someone approached from behind Lil. At first Jon worried it was a nurse or her father, but as they came closer he realized they were floating above the snow. He squinted, making out blonde pigtails and bare feet. It was the angel from school.

She instantly surged out from behind Lil with a roar of rage. “I knew it! It _is_ you!” She hefted an accusing finger like a loaded gun. “Sock Sowachowski, _you bastard!_ ”

Sock squeaked in panic, trying to hide behind Jon again, who was rightly very confused. “You have one too?”

Lil’s bewildered expression turned to the angel for help.

“They’re going to have to scrape you off the ground with a spatula when I’m done with you!” Face a screwed up mess of vengeance, she ignored Lil in favor of advancing threateningly.

“Jon!” Sock hissed, offering his hand. “Quick, do the thing!”

Jon examined the hand, remembering how it passed through anything physical. Keeping in mind the contract, he gulped for courage and grasped it tightly. For a moment nothing happened. He was more amazed at the physical state of the hand than whatever it might have done… at least until an explosion threw him away from Lil and the angel. Rocks dug into his face and hands as the ground punched the air out of his lungs, and he coughed in the dust, fingers tingling for snow but finding nothing but warm earth.

“Jojo!”

Jon turned to the voice, panting. A towering wall of fire extended around he and the demon. On the other side Lil frantically scooped snow onto the hands of the angel.

“I’m fine I’m fine,” she insisted, pushing Lil away and clutching one hand to her chest. “It just caught me a bit.” Distorted through the flames, her face wrinkled like soggy paper. She grimaced and huffed and hissed specks of saliva, glaring into the fire, past Jon’s shoulder. “Sock, you coward, come out here and fight me!”

Sock landed in the dirt, raising a puff of dust. He worked his jaw, watching as Jon pushed himself to his feet. “Ready?”

The base of his skull itched with vertigo. He coughed in the heat, hyperaware of Lil shouting nonsense at him beyond the roar in his ears. “Yeah.”

“Jonathan,” punctured the melee, “that’s suicide!”

Just barely visible between the tornado of fire, Jonathan’s shoulders hunched a concave around his chest. His mouth moved, but with her frustrated pout he realized she couldn’t hear a thing. At her severe look, he puffed a sigh, and yelled, “I KNOW!” They glared at each other through the flying dust, trying to project their will with merely their eyes.

“I’m the hero of this story!” Jonathan’s voice whisked through the vengeful air. “I’m going to _save you_ , Lil!”

“No you’re not!” She snarled. “Because this isn’t a story. This is _life!_ This is my story and your story and your aunt’s story and Zack’s story! I’m not a character! I’m not a plot device! I’m not going to be passive while you throw away your happy ending!!” She wheezed for a few seconds, gaze still digging like lasers into his eyes, wind whistling between her clenched teeth, eyebrows drawn down. “Now you’ve gone and upset me.” He was loosed for a moment when she closed her eyes to try to regulate her breathing again. More than anything he felt like an unmoored ship, tossing in the tumult of her stormy speech. The nagging feeling at the base of his skull ceased for a precious second as he considered her words, his actions.

A hand clawed into his shoulder. “Hey,” Sock released a frustrated breath, dragging his attention back into the circle, “we’re doing this _now_.”

Jonathan stepped away.“Wait, but―”

The demon’s face darkened. “If you’re having second thoughts you’re having them too late. You’ve signed the contract and now you’re fulfilling your end of the bargain.” It paused with a sly look. “You do want your girlfriend to live, don’t you?”

More than anything.

Jonathan looked one last time to Lil, the bangs drawn out of her ponytail waving languidly across her torn face. He didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t say anything. Gravel crunched beneath his sneakers as he turned away, lips pursed and jaw muscles stiff.

Sock was now the only thing facing him. He blinked with a huge grin, vibrating pent-up excitement. “This is going to be fun!”

By now quite used to his odd nature, Jonathan simply nodded, all energy spent on trying not to run back to Lil. “Okay. Let’s just get this over with.” He stuck out a hand, returning the demon’s smile with a sharp one of his own.

With a delighted little spin in the air Sock grasped his hand. “Good luck, Jonathan!” He gave a firm, sharp shake, a sealing of the deal, and pushed him over backwards. Jonathan’s eyes grew wide with surprise, mouth opening to tell him that now was no time for jokes, but he hit the ground heavily, all breath leaving his lungs with an audible puff, and just kept falling.

 

“Oh god,” Lil breathed, mind filled with Jonathan’s still form on the ground. “Oh god. Oh god _oh god oh god_ …”

“Well.” Jojo shrugged, eyes red and lip torn. “He’s dead.”

“Don’t say that!” Lil’s voice strained past her closing throat.

“It’s not a nice reality, but he sold his soul to a demon. He’s the bad kinda dead—he’s in Hell,” she reassured harshly. “Stupid idiot. He was already in too far you couldn’t have done anything.”

The snow was still falling, collecting on Jon’s face and hoodie. He didn’t move to brush it off, the flakes didn’t melt on his face, his chest didn’t rise and fall. Nothing in the clearing so much as twitched, save Jojo’s casual bobbing in the air. The demon was gone. The fire too. Somewhere in the back of her head she was screaming at the top of her lungs, but in reality she was only crouched on the ground, gaze unblinking upon the boy she had nearly sewn her heart to.

Struggling to breathe, she began to crawl towards him. “I— I shouldn’t have broken up with him.” She stumbled over a hidden pothole, feeling Jojo close to her shoulder. “He wouldn’t have gone out and done this if I’d just—”

“Lil,” Jojo grunted, “don’t blame yourself for this. He’d written up the contract _waaay_ before you dumped him.”

Her stinging hand rose from the snow, hovering over his cheek, white as chalk. “But I—” His waxy face was stiff and cold, her fingers didn’t elicit any reaction. The screaming in her head intensified, her pulse drowned out all sound, there was copper on her tongue and smoke in her nose. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t feel him, there was just cold, unmoving snow.

Stiff cold unmoving.

Alive as frozen dirt.

Dead.

His eyes opened.

She gazed blankly at them, watching cloud clear from the cornea. The iris bled green. He blinked. His jaw cracked.

She stared.

“Woah,” he croaked. “Your face is really close.”

“Lil!” Jojo hooked the collar of her shirt, employing impossible strength to drag her through the snow and away from Jon in mere seconds.

“Jojo…” she protested faintly. He was moving.

Jojo landed between them, glaring at the figure as he rose unsteadily to his feet. “That’s not your Jon.”

He glanced at the fiery little angel, lips quirking into a faint grin, then met Lil’s gaze. Jon’s eyes weren’t green.

“Jon…?” She tried, desperate.

He shook his head. “Jon’s not here anymore. He sold the place.” Each hand cracked as he flexed the muscles, his neck bent and snapped, and his shoulders realigned with twin pops. “Ah, so stiff.” He muttered. Then, like a child with a new balloon, he smiled, possibly wider than human. “I’ve heard a lot about you, but I’m sure you don’t know a thing about me.”

Jojo growled threateningly as he raised a foot. With a laugh he lowered it again. “You certainly haven’t changed, Jojo.” Rubbing his stiff face, still smiling, eyes warm, he met Lil’s eyes again. “I’m Sock.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter heavily influenced by The Killers' 'Dustland Fairytale', with a smattering of 'Breath of Life' (Florence + the Machine) and 'Afraid' (The Neighbourhood). Next chapter is very heavily about Sock. (Because where has his hat gone!)


	3. Send It (Missing bit)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I suddenly realized that my copy/pasting of the last part I posted left out a little chunk and without it I might have confused some readers uhh… I’ll post it here if you don’t want to go back and read it and I might somehow work it into part three if it bothers me too much. Sorry...

Nobody don’t go there no more. Don’t you hear? It’s haunted.

They giggled outside the overgrown picket fence, pushing her shoulders, alive in their treason. Whispers in the dark.

He went crazy.

Creaking wood, delighted little screams.

Don’t go in, he might get you!

The flaking gate swung open like a limp butler, gesturing to the fractured walkway and ruptured porch beyond. Nervous shuffling.

You guys don’t really believe that, do you?

Wild gray grass rustled in the sighs of the wind. Old boards groaned again. Glass clung like jagged dew to the window frames and the tongue of a weathered carpet hung over the threshold. Rocks clattered behind her. They retreated.

There isn’t anything there. I’ll show you.

The front step bowed beneath her weight.

Lil, my momma said not to go in there.

Stale air whistled through the empty doorframe, whisking bangs aside to reveal darkness beyond her pool of watery moonlight.

Well she’s not my momma.

The entire building creaked with her every footfall. There was no dust, the bare wood exposed and raw as though roughly sanded. Corners piled with debris and dirt shifted like thieves in her peripheral, clouding her halo of thought with suppressed anxiety. Ten steps into the foyer. Look up. There was the remnants of a chandelier, all frayed wires and dangling poles. To the left another room, two chewed chairs arranged in the center, empty beer bottles perched below. At her right an empty space, footprints in the dirt.

So nobody went there anymore, huh?

Carpet scraps clung to corners and edges, flipped and bleached and stained until they looked more like bits of dirty paper. Stuffing and springs bled out of a lone armchair huddled in the space behind the stairway. The puckering wall gaped in a few places, thin clouds of insulation floating gently off bare pipes and wires in the breeze. She covered the dull gleam of one, copper cold and dead beneath her fingers.

The second floor was equally forgotten, but less dilapidated. There was full carpeting, brown with age, and broken bulbs in their sockets like stalagmites. The first bedroom was blue, paint pastel and chalky, window paneless and full of writhing willow branches. They waved at her as she squeaked past, snapping a crude tattoo against the slivering window frame. She passed a steel bed frame, rusting and bent beneath the crooked weight of a swollen mattress. Hangers were piled on the floor outside the gawping closet, and the remnants of toys lay scattered in corners and near the warped dresser. More beer bottles, shards of glass glinting maliciously in stains in the carpet. She toed the head of a teddy bear cautiously, foot crunching in a pile of glass under the shift in weight.

The next bedroom was the master, slightly larger than the last and home to a king-sized sleigh bed. She hesitated to enter, chest dripping with a leaden coppery tang that curled out her lips on sharp hesitant breath.

Don’t you hear? It’s haunted…

The door was hung on a single hinge, light and broken, swinging and whining as she stepped in. Thick air ruffled her ponytail and trailed across her cheeks, bringing with it the scent of mildew cement and arctic breath. Joints creaked and expanded as the house heaved. At the edge of her gaze she caught movement and slowly she trailed its memory, brow furrowed.

You’re not haunted.

The house breathed again.

She stopped at the edge of the bed. The mattress and covers were dusty but intact. Two large imprints curled beneath. Vandals hadn’t dared set foot in here. Nobody could be double-triple-quadruple dog dared enough to take anything.

The movement continued, dragging her eyes to the huge dark stain beneath her boots. While she was undeniably unsettled she realized there wasn’t anything there that could hurt her. Deep in her warm marrow she recognized the echoes.

You’re not haunted… you just remember.

Becoming aware of her slow, meditative breath she inhaled like a bellows, coughing as dust rushed to fill her throat. Her friends would be worried. She paused in the threshold of the room as an acute ache filled her senses, and turned again to the occupied bed, noticing something on the rumpled comforter. They were yellow as though brand new, lenses clear as crystal. Squinting did little to sharpen their indefinite shape. What she knew for sure: the goggles hadn’t been there before.

Air caressing her ear, prodding her back. Out.

She would return many times. Things came and went. The goggles were constant. Don’t touch, they weren’t for her. But remember like the house. Keep them in mind.

Her doctor gave nothing away as she examined the CAT scans. What about exposure? she asked. Have you been anywhere with antagonistic elements?

She shrugged, remembered the house. A crew came back shaking their heads. Malignant fibers. Old building. Definitely harmful to predisposed lungs. The stain. The phantoms. They were now hers. Why had she gone in? Why was she so stupid?

They said it was haunted. She proved them wrong.

_He might get you!_

Maybe he had got her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So when Lil is going off a Jojo and she mentions a house this was supposed to be it but I'm dumb.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically one day in the shower I was like "What if Jonathan had willingly gone looking for Sock instead of just getting stuck with him?" and now you have this monster sorry. (Also on [Tumblr](http://pingnova.tumblr.com/post/66979478721/do-it-pt-1-start-it).)


End file.
